Document Review, Texas Style

Not much document review getting done this weekend.

Funny, but I don’t remember evacuating before Katrina and Rita.  It seems like in the old days, we just hung out through a hurricane.  Now people around me, on the North side of Houston, are boarding up windows and heading out of town.

It’s really no fun at all that I’m sitting here about to get hit with a hurricane, and all I can do is worry about how much document review I’m not getting done.  I guess that’s just the nature of the business. (combined with living from paycheck to paycheck)

Summer doesn’t end around here, it lingers until everyone is so tired of it they just can’t stand it, then it hangs around just a little more, then leaves, then comes back to see if you missed it.

I got my kids back to school today, so there will be a little more time for things other than work, maybe.

The project that has carried me through this summer is now coming to an end, much more abruptly than the Texas Summer, and that has me looking around at the market.

I have found only a few small projects ramping up.  Couple of coders needed here or there.  Nothing too inspiring.  Not much news from the major contract attorney houses either, as far as I can tell.

As always, I’d love to hear from anyone with any different news.

Not satisfied with kicking all the document review jobs off to new lands filled with willing , hungry and lower paid attorney populations, the industry is also courting client companies with new ways to reduce their “discovery spend” at it’s most “bloated” component, the document review.

How, you ask? With Per Document pricing.

Per Document pricing fits in well with the client company’s need for predictability, and it enforces a form of accountability onto what has hitherto been the secretive mess that is “Law Firm Billing.” The idea fits in with the concepts I learned in my mis-spent undergraduate years cobbling together a managerial studies degree.

It doesn’t fit as well with my concepts of how to best represent a client as an attorney.

How do you feel about joining a project that has been bid out at 11 cents per document? Do you think you’d have the right incentives to protect the client’s interests and produce only appropriate documents?

Wondering why agencies are trying to find attorneys who will work for less than $30 per hour?

I sent a very informal survey out to folks whose email addresses I could find in my gmail account. I asked what reviews they know about that are going on around town. I’ll post and edit the results in this post from time to time as I get more information.

Hudson still has a long term review going on at their offices downtown that is still, I believe, taking up two shifts. As far as I know there are around 40-50 on this review, but I’ll take corrections on that.

Huron usually has several reviews going on at any one time, and someone heard of a review potentially about to start up there. Let’s say that there are 50 people over there.

Fulbright has several reviews going on. Only a couple can be termed “long term” and those are very small. There are a total of 40 to 50 working on reviews there from Pye Legal, Hudson, Providus and a couple from LegalPeople

Jones Day apparently has a review with around 30 people on it. Think that one is Providus

There’s supposedly a Galleria Area review of about 30 people.

Let me know what I got wrong and what I missed!

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.

According to a news release in TechnoLawyer by Applied Discovery, a Lexis Nexis company, Hudson has teamed up with Applied Discovery to provide a ready set of “expert” document reviewers trained and ready to go on Applied’s review platform.

As Hudson’s Exec VP, Mark Zamsky points out, “Our collaborative offering with Applied Discovery affords Hudson Legal another chance to reduce clients’ discovery spend…”

Is this a good thing? Does this take away what may be one of the few remaining strong points of a contract review attorney which is exposure to multiple review platforms?

Either way, it’s interesting to note Hudson’s interest in, and focus on, reducing the “client’s discovery spend.”

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?