Send me an email if you’re in Houston and can do a little contract work this Sunday and some this week.
UPDATE - Thanks, I did get some responses to this, but I do need to let you know that I am not a part of a staffing agency. I’m an attorney who works in ediscovery and doc review, and keeps track of the document review market in Houston. Don’t need more resumes!
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
I’ve heard a couple horror stories lately about reviews that were, let’s say, run differently than normal. Any chance I can get some comments about any Houston document reviews from the last year and what made them “special?”
As if my last post wasn’t horrific enough, it had to be punctuated by the following email blast from Donovan & Watkins looking for document review attorneys:
Hello. Donovan & Watkins is currently searching for at least 100 contract attorneys for an electronic document review project in Houston. The projected start date is July 6th and it is expected to last a minimum of 6 months. The pay rate will be $25/hour. Location will likely be downtown and the Galleria area.
Please confirm with your recruiter - Caroline Garcia or Kim Burrow, if you’re available and interested in this assignment, as soon as possible. We have been asked to present resumes tomorrow,…
So, what is your 3-year, post graduate level, debt inducing degree getting you these days? A pay rate somewhere between baby-sitting and pushing a button on an assembly line. At least you don’t have to commute very far and have no dry cleaning bills when you baby-sit.
By the way, why do they need 100 attorneys? I’ve only seen a few reviews get to that size in Houston. Most of them started off being pretty small and ended up growing to that size gradually.
Don’t know about you, but I’ve heard about quite a bit of activity in the last few weeks.
One project was started then apparently abandoned up in the Woodlands. It was funny to watch the fireworks as 4 different agencies were looking for people who wanted to work there. Slight differences in rates being offered too. I guess the lowest bid eventuall won, and Donovan Watkins ended up sending reviewers up there. It’s a bit of a drive up there, so some of the reviewers must have preferred the drive downtown to the new project at DeNovo that started last week. When almost half of the review decided they wanted to work somewhere else, I guess the company hit the reset button on the review and they’re retooling to go at it another way.
De Novo started off with 50 people, added another 10, and now they’re looking for a few more people, (25 more?) in case you’re wondering. I think it’s at a “below market” or should we say “new” market rate of under $35 per hour.
I think Fulbright is humming along at over 100 attorneys, but they may be getting tired of having all those contract lawyers running around the halls of Fulbright Tower. There must be some other place they can put them.
Still a few big oil reviews sputtering around, but nothing noteworthy as far as numbers of reviewers being employed or fired.
That’s all I know for now, let me know if you hear anything else.
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.
Almost every review I’ve been on lately has involved keyword searches some time prior to the documents being presented for review. The art of finding the correct set of keywords to bring out the most relevant documents for a particular document collection can indeed be a very complex and interesting part of the process.
Or, it can consist of a couple of lawyers (or a lone associate) sitting down in a room trying to dream up what he/she thinks will be the words that will bring out relevant communications from what he/she thinks are the types of things their particular client might say in emails and documents.
Check out this discussion of part of the issue. Craig Ball also discusses part of the review process related to key terms at Grimm Prognosis for ESI Search.
Is your current review well thought out or did someone throw darts at a Thesaurus to get your keyword set together?