Document Review, Texas Style

Summer doesn’t end around here, it lingers until everyone is so tired of it they just can’t stand it, then it hangs around just a little more, then leaves, then comes back to see if you missed it.

I got my kids back to school today, so there will be a little more time for things other than work, maybe.

The project that has carried me through this summer is now coming to an end, much more abruptly than the Texas Summer, and that has me looking around at the market.

I have found only a few small projects ramping up.  Couple of coders needed here or there.  Nothing too inspiring.  Not much news from the major contract attorney houses either, as far as I can tell.

As always, I’d love to hear from anyone with any different news.

Almost every review I’ve been on lately has involved keyword searches some time prior to the documents being presented for review.  The art of finding the correct set of keywords to bring out the most relevant documents for a particular document collection can indeed be a very complex and interesting part of the process. 

Or, it can consist of a couple of lawyers (or a lone associate) sitting down in a room trying to dream up what he/she thinks will be the words that will bring out relevant communications from what he/she thinks are the types of things their particular client might say in emails and documents.

Check out this discussion of part of the issue.  Craig Ball also discusses part of the review process related to key terms at Grimm Prognosis for ESI Search.

Is your current review well thought out or did someone throw darts at a Thesaurus to get your keyword set together?

Not one to complain when I actually have work, I’ve gone, in the last month, from the relative “good life”at a big firm to the never ending hours of a temp review with an agency.

I have to work over 50% more hours now just to make the dollars I was making a month ago. I have to keep making the same dollars because the wife and kids still exist, still live at the home I’m trying to pay for, and I have no plans to get rid of any one or subset of them.

The not yet paid for Suburban in the garage does not reside in the same “most favored relation” status, and had better not give me any excuses to start trying to investigate the resale market. It has, unfortunately as far as I’m concerned, never given us a moment of headache (other than at the gas pump). In fact, our Suburban probably spends its nights in the only “inside the garage” parking space trying to stop laughing about my two paid for run-down cars that live on the street.

My two cars are a pair of stories in themselves. First, I have to have two because if I didn’t have two, I’d have to be prepared to walk or call a cab when the one was in the shop. With two, you always have a spare. And, I need a spare because they’re not worth having comprehensive insurance on. No comprehensive, no rental car. Unless it’s the other person’s fault, but I have a hard time getting that to happen.

My two paid for cars have a combined mileage of well over fourteen laps around the globe, but I can’t bear to get rid of them. One, my wife bought at least 2 boyfriends before we met, and we’ve been married 14 years now. The other I bought after the first one was totaled in a wreck, and I found out they wouldn’t renew the title until I did all sorts of paperwork relating to salvage titles and copies of reciepts and all sorts of that stuff. Then the CV joints went out and the A/C went out and the lights stopped working sometimes and it was really leaking a lot of oil.

The other one, I bought off of a friend’s mom, when I had some extra money. It promptly began to overheat every time I drove it. In one year, I’ve replaced the fan clutch 4 times, had 2 radiators, replace all the spare pulleys on the front end, bought a new water pump, several thermostats, and then, to cap it off, they detected coolant coming out of the tailpipe. Apparently that hurts the resale value…go figure.

Back to the good news. I’m busy, and I get to work from home on this project!

I happen to have a little more time on my hands now….I’ll let you read into that what you will.

Give me a shout, sign up on the blog, let’s get some conversation going about the contract attorney situation in Houston in 2008.

I haven’t heard about any new contract projects in Houston for quite a while. I have heard about expansions of ongoing projects, and some changes here and there, but no real developing news.

There has been some movement outside of Houston that I have heard about. In particular, I’ve seen some movement in Austin, and of course projects are churning on the East Coast, but nothing here. I’d love for anyone to correct me on this.

Heard that management was changing at the Huron contract review shop. Nathalie Hofman, who they brought into town to set up the whole thing, was sent back to the East to take care of some sort of problems over there. She was one of the best managers I have ever worked with, and I was sorry to see her go, but I haven’t even met her replacement. They’ve been doing a lot of hiring at Huron, outside of the contract review area as well, and lots of good people I’ve worked with in the past have ended up over there.

I was listening to a commentator the other day say that the issues raised in the recent Qualcomm case were isolated in the sense that they were not likely to happen very often in the real world and could be explained by the circumstances of the case including various factors such as:

First - It was a patent case, and patent litigators are a very cut-throat lot when it comes to litigation.

Second - It happened during the heat of the trial and was not a decision made in the cool and calculating world of pre-trial discovery.

A word about Qualcomm if you don’t know the facts. While the fight continues, (and goes on and on and on…now the sanctions against the attorneys have been reversed and remanded so they can use the “self defense” exception to privilege to defend themselves against Qualcomm’s self serving declarations) the Qualcomm was ordered to pay over $8 million for “monumental and intentional” discovery violations.

Qualcomm failed to produce tens of thousands of documents requested in discovery and six of Qualcomm’s outside attorneys “assisted Qualcomm in committing this incredible discovery violation by intentionally hiding or recklessly ignoring relevant documents, ignoring or rejecting numerous warning signs that Qualcomm’s document search was inadequate, and blindly accepting Qualcomm’s unsupported assurances that its document search was adequate.”

Unfortunately, the attorneys “then used the lack of evidence to repeatedly and forcefully make false statements and arguments to the court and jury.” The Court then set out an entire program for the parties to follow to ensure that the problem was corrected and wouldn’t happen again.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been involved as a contract attorney in document reviews where questionable decisions were made. Some were more egregious than others. I imagine there’s still a legal team out there who may want to print out electronic documents to paper to give to the other side. Maybe there’s a legal team out there who thinks it’s a good idea to look through email and produce only responsive documents without regard to their sources or attachments.

Have you seen a recent example of a decision in a document review that could possibly lead to a Qualcomm type situation in a later courtroom showdown? Let’s try to keep this anonymous.

Not satisfied with kicking all the document review jobs off to new lands filled with willing , hungry and lower paid attorney populations, the industry is also courting client companies with new ways to reduce their “discovery spend” at it’s most “bloated” component, the document review.

How, you ask? With Per Document pricing.

Per Document pricing fits in well with the client company’s need for predictability, and it enforces a form of accountability onto what has hitherto been the secretive mess that is “Law Firm Billing.” The idea fits in with the concepts I learned in my mis-spent undergraduate years cobbling together a managerial studies degree.

It doesn’t fit as well with my concepts of how to best represent a client as an attorney.

How do you feel about joining a project that has been bid out at 11 cents per document? Do you think you’d have the right incentives to protect the client’s interests and produce only appropriate documents?

Wondering why agencies are trying to find attorneys who will work for less than $30 per hour?

I sent a very informal survey out to folks whose email addresses I could find in my gmail account. I asked what reviews they know about that are going on around town. I’ll post and edit the results in this post from time to time as I get more information.

Hudson still has a long term review going on at their offices downtown that is still, I believe, taking up two shifts. As far as I know there are around 40-50 on this review, but I’ll take corrections on that.

Huron usually has several reviews going on at any one time, and someone heard of a review potentially about to start up there. Let’s say that there are 50 people over there.

Fulbright has several reviews going on. Only a couple can be termed “long term” and those are very small. There are a total of 40 to 50 working on reviews there from Pye Legal, Hudson, Providus and a couple from LegalPeople

Jones Day apparently has a review with around 30 people on it. Think that one is Providus

There’s supposedly a Galleria Area review of about 30 people.

Let me know what I got wrong and what I missed!

While favorite review attorney death threat target David Perla continues to disparage US contract attorneys and export legal review overseas with Pangea3, he’s not alone. Perla is joined by others just as anxious to bring the reality to lawyers that accountants have had to live with for the last few years. Kunal Shah over at Aeqvitas for instance are trying just as hard to get your legal work moved to India, boasting US licensed attorneys in India, and then there’s Manthan Services…there are many more.

At root, here, is the same dynamic that brings down costs and raises productivity in every market it touches. Split up a process to the smallest component part that can be handled in an efficient manner, and send that component to where it can be accomplished in the best manner for the least money. At least the Wall Street Journal thinks that Indian lawyers are getting paid $20 per hour. Don’t know about that, but at least that helps put a floor to where wages in the US will fall.

Any review attorney would be hard pressed to argue that every moment of his or her time spent reviewing documents was the highest best use of his or her brain power. It is a basic tenant of standard document reviews that you have to stay awake through the numbingly boring hours of reading irrelevant chaff only to be mentally prepared to realize the moment when you stumble across the needle that is the document that actually relates to a case.

If you can find a more efficient way to get rid of the irrelevant stuff and leave the somewhat relevant stuff there, so that the mind actually has to work most of the time when reviewing the documents, you have accomplished something. Various incredibly expensive review platforms have been developed and used to accomplish just this task.

For the most part, when people are talking about moving reviews overseas, they’re still talking about moving first pass review, and keeping the higher level analysis back at home where the ultimate decision-makers are. Perla hints at also moving higher level work overseas, but that’s the kind of work that brings in the ethicists and Bar groups like those in New York and San Diego wondering about unauthorized practice of law and whether you’ve notified your client that you’ve punted your work to another culture.

Is it really worth fighting the march toward more efficient use of time? Billing for a document review means charging an hourly rate that is more than necessary for some or most of the tasks (clicking “Non-Responsive” on a useless document) and less than what should be paid for some tasks (judgment call on issue coding a relevant document).

Clients are alive to the fact that most of the time spent looking through an un-filtered, un-reviewed universe of documents is pretty much wasted time. They’ll pay more for the use of a well trained legal mind when they know that mind is not wasting it’s time on useless documents.

7/1/07 Edit - Yet another article about Oursourcing to India…Sixty percent a year growth…First mention I’ve seen of Indian trained lawyers doing American legal work…quetionable stat of 300,000 enrolled in law school annually in India…someone from Fulbright & Jaworski (a place I’m familiar with) went over to start up an Indian based law shop…the article in the Washington Post.

According to a news release in TechnoLawyer by Applied Discovery, a Lexis Nexis company, Hudson has teamed up with Applied Discovery to provide a ready set of “expert” document reviewers trained and ready to go on Applied’s review platform.

As Hudson’s Exec VP, Mark Zamsky points out, “Our collaborative offering with Applied Discovery affords Hudson Legal another chance to reduce clients’ discovery spend…”

Is this a good thing? Does this take away what may be one of the few remaining strong points of a contract review attorney which is exposure to multiple review platforms?

Either way, it’s interesting to note Hudson’s interest in, and focus on, reducing the “client’s discovery spend.”