This web site will provide a guide to the “industry” that is known as litigation document review and investigatory document review: mergers and acquisitions; antitrust investigations; class actions and other complex litigation; mega securities and financial transactions, etc. These cases require an army of attorney and paralegal document reviewers. These document review projects tend to be short-term in length --- a few days, a week, a few months, some even a few years --- and employ attorneys only for the length of the project, although there are situations when an attorney is “held on” by a firm to work on a follow-on project, or on a full-time basis.
It is an industry that has flourished in the last 8-10 years as law firms have adopted the cost-saving manufacturing principle of “just-in-time” production, applied to a service industry: hire attorneys “just when you need them” but only on a part-time basis. However, many law firms have turned this not only into a cost savings procedure, but a profit center as well.
But the use of contract attorneys/free lancers has expanded. As we have mentioned in the past, encapsulated by Joe Miller at www.jdwired.com (an excellent site): “contract attorneys are the key to clients’ two-fold objective to both reduce skyrocketing legal costs and to retain counsel whose demographics reflect the diversity of their customers.” Clearly the use of contract attorneys has moved beyond e-discovery/document review.
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