Contract Attorney Wages
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?