Contract Attorney, Texas Style

I am a member of a couple of working groups related to the Electronic Discovery Reference Model.  One is an ongoing project trying to keep up with changing standards in document review.  I’m supposed to come up with language describing recent trends in resource considerations.

Basically, this is going to be a description of issues and trends in management, human resources and physical resources as they relate to document review. 

Many of the members of EDRM are vendors and/or law firm representatives.  I am one of few individual members, and I want to represent the interests of the contract attorney in the process.  One thing that I really want to hit on is to bring the contract attorney perspective to the process.  If you check out the current version of what the EDRM has related to this issue, you can see that it’s put together pretty much from the perspective of the large law firm and the large vendor.

As an example, the first paragraph of the Review Environment, Communication and Technical Support section states:

Depending on the needs of the case, a centralized location for the review may be set-up. It is equally acceptable for the review team to work remotely or within their individual offices although this may require a greater need for internal communication protocols. In any case, the review environment should be well lit, be free of distracting outside noise, and be positioned so that no unrelated foot traffic runs through the area.

If this fits your document review situation (toss up whether you use your individual office or work in the same room with the other attorneys) then I guess I don’t need much additional input.  If, however, your review experience was a little different (foot traffic, insect traffic, no windows, smells, crowding, uncomfortable chairs….) then please give it some thought and let me know what you think should be a part of a standard set of considerations when putting a document review together.

I had been thinking about how many document review centers had sprung up in Houston lately when the Posse List came up with this post about on-shore document reviews.

In my comment to the post, I noted that I now know of at least 6 document review centers in Houston, 3 of which have been set up since last summer.

As far as I can tell, not all of the review centers have been particularly active this fall.  One with no business since September, one with no business since July, one with a trickle of business (7 attorneys) through the whole fall ’till January when they picked up another 14 for 2 additional reviews.

A couple of in-house reviews seem to be holding up pretty well, but there appears to still be excess capacity in the review centers which bothers me because it means downward pressure on the hourly rates as the centers compete for business.  This has started showing up and I’d love to hear any additional input on this from the Houston area.

Is document review really what you’re after?  I know for the most part contract attorneys that I’m talking to are thinking more about the next project than about where this all leads down the road, but there are a heck of a lot of changes going on out there that are going to make a difference.

First, there’s the economy, stupid!  (sorry about that, just had to)

The changes in the economy are already wreaking havoc on law firms and therefore the legal industry (click here),  but it goes further.  The economy that is just now affecting the firms has been affecting the big companies that form the basis for most contract attorney work of the document review kind for a long time.  Companies have been taking over the work of electronic discovery (example Subaru(click here))  since they first discovered how much law firms wanted to charge for it.

The economy, though, is just part of what’s regulating the pace that the changes in technology are forcing on the litigation landscape.  Many pundits analyze the shift in how discovery is handled (click here) and even predict the potential death knell of the lawyer (click here),  but can’t yet help answer the question of what’s going to happen to the contract attorney.

The document review contract attorney who does nothing more than put in their hours and go home after managing to review just enough documents to not get fired is going to go away.  This kind of attorney is going to be the first casualty of the changes coming to the practice of law whether because of economic choices or the more fundamental disruptive technologies that Richard Susskind (click here) describes.

To survive working in the area of document review, you will have to understand what’s going on with technology and how it relates to the communications systems that companies are and will be using.  While the concepts mentioned by Matus and Davis (click here) may seem a little technical, these thoughts have actually been around for a few years and Charles Skamser is right to talk about the confusion that exists (click here) as vendors fight their way through helping attorneys find more efficient ways through the mess of communications.

Don’t forget that almost every company at LegalTech, plus the LPO industry taking more and more content review offshore has one purpose which is to reduce the amount of attorney (including contract attorney) work needed in your world.