Document Review, Texas Style

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.”

There are several good articles out there about contract attorney rates. One on My Attorney Blog, another on Temporary Attorney: Sweatshop Edition, both of which focus on East Coast rates. Found one more discussing rates in Philadelphia. It may be possible to put together similar charts for rates in the Houston market, but my guess would be that the comparison would not be favorable and would probably not help the Houston market at all from the Contract Attorney perspective.

Seems to me that the more transparent the market is, the more the client companies know about how much the end reviewers actually get paid, the more pressure the client companies place on firms and agencies to lower their fees toward that rate. The client company has the ultimate power of the purse and can place great pressure, even on larger firms, to only use particular agencies or only pay certain amounts for document review.

Given our market, which is not really a hotspot for document review, despite some very large recent review projects, and given the “employment-at-will” history of our state, it doesn’t seem Contract Attorneys in this market are ever going to get much bargaining power unless some really big long term projects show up soon.

Thoughts?

I’m trying to get a little conversation going among the contract/temporary/document review attorneys in Houston Texas. Maybe we can share some info on reviews coming up, where to work, where not to work…where you can go to the bathroom without checking in with someone first…Where you can see out the windows.

Or, maybe we can talk about what’s going to be happening with document review in the next few years. Will lawyers be able to make a living doing this in the US? Will all the jobs go to India? Will just some of the jobs leave? Will first pass review be off-shored leaving only higher level review to be done here?

How about the impact changes in electronic discovery have had on the process of document review?  Can you succeed at this without understanding what’s going on with the technological changes in collecting, filtering and processing electronically stored information?

Give me your thoughts…what are the biggest issues facing contract attorneys in Houston?