Document Review, Texas Style

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.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 4th, 2008 at 09:57 and is filed under the Market. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.