Contract Attorney, Texas Style

Also, thinking about the Stanford criminal trial that will be tried in Houston, in Judge Hittner’s court, the govt. collected a lot of info.  For the receivership, FTI has billed for collection of “over 500 hard drives, dozens of flash drives, CD’s, DVDs, dozens of portable hard drives, over 140 Email PST’s with attachments, individual and group share drives, and 120 file shares and 38 servers.”  Sounds like there may be a lot of documents in there to be reviewed.  That’s good news.  Unless you’re one of the defendants … or the person paying to defend someone.

So, review attorneys are being marginalized, our jobs are being sent overseas, and what’s left of the process of finding, processing and reviewing documents is being turned over to computers.

Is it really?

The 2008 TREC Legal Track report had some interesting findings.  While it is 45 pages of pretty thick statistics and testing mumbo jumbo, it’s digested fairly completely in a couple of blogs here and here.  Four teams participated in the Interactive Task part of the project last year.  The Interactive Task attempts to mimic a real life litigation situation and see what search protocol can find the most relevant documents in a large document set.

Of the four teams who participated last year, two were groups from universities and 2 were vendors using their search platforms (Clearwell and H5).  The only one that performed any measurable level above the other participants was H5.  I’ve worked with this company before and I have an idea how they managed to accomplish their performance.

None of the teams were teams of document review attorneys.

Here’s my theory… I think the best option, after all the dust settles, in this war of “who will best handle electronic document review” will be the appropriate combination of experienced reviewers with the right search tools and methods.   I have a vendor who has volunteered to host the data for me and provide access to the database to a team of reviewers.  I have my ideas about how to go about finding relevant documents, now all I need are reviewers.

Do you want to play?

I mean, really, even the Sedona Conference wants you to help out!

I’m looking for a team of review attorneys who will volunteer to do what they do for a living (still looking for corporate sponsorship to make this part less painful) for some amount of time (up to the equivalent of a part time job) between about the second or third week in July and going through some time in August.  I will want you to keep track of your time to make the whole project more worthwhile, and you will have to be pretty comfortable with the review platform (probably Ringtail) and with running searches and generally being flexible and positive.   (Like a gazelle escaping a marauding computerized document search lion)

If my theory proves correct, I believe that the best solution in the document review market may well be a specialized document review boutique firm that has “documented” results that are better and more reasonably priced than any outside law firm or vendor alone can possibly put together.  This project could be the seed for that reveiw firm.

Like I said, the project is based around a made up Complaint in Federal Court.  The action is a securities fraud class action on behalf of purchasers of the common stock of Volteron Corp. (“Volteron”) between June 1, 1999 and December 2, 2001 (“The Class Period”), seeking to pursue remedies under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (the “Exchange Act”).

If you’re interested, check out the entire Complaint and Requests for Production which can be seen by clicking here.

Then, if you’re still interested, send me an email at admin@documentrelations.com

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.

Let me apologize to those who have stopped by over the last month or so.  I have been totally disconnected…mentally and technically.

I’ve added some pages about some local agencies so we can get some comment and activity about current recruiting efforts going on in Houston to try to get a feel for the level of activity out there.  We’ll see if that generates any activity.

Please let me know if you have any other thoughts about what info would be helpful.

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’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?