The Rise of the Litigation Support Professional

There has been much discussion recently about the emerging litigation support profession.  The profession has evolved over the last 10 years right along with the growth of electronic discovery. Estimates indicate that there are over 10,000 litigation support professionals (LSP) in the U.S.   They operate at the intersection of law and technology, helping to steward ESI through processing, analysis, review and production. You will also find litigation support professionals increasingly involved in earlier phases of the e-discovery process, such as identification, preservation, collection and discovery conference preparation.  And many of these positions are held by Posse List members/contract attorneys who have moved full-time and part-time into the field.

At LegalTech West, attended by The Posse List’s Chief Technology Officer (our coverage can be found here) , Espe Rebollar, President of the Association of Litigation Support Professionals (ALSP), and Winlock Brown, former ALSP president, outlined ALSP’s very interesting exploration of a certification process for this new profession.  There was also excellent content at the May International Litigation Support Leaders Conference in Washington, D.C. (see our coverage here), with topics ranging from project management to handling foreign language data to EDD 101 for folks new to the profession.

Note:  We will expand upon this certification process in the coming weeks, and related jobs, as well as your many questions about obtaining certification in such software as the new Catalyst CR 8.5 document management and document review software (click here) being adopted by many law firms and corporations.   A certification status (as a LSP or in specific software) has helped many Posse List members to obtain work.  We are going to organize live certification classes in several cities as well as via the web.

Fios has been at the leading edge of developing support for LSPs with webcasts, white papers, checklists and other “best practices” resources to assist litigation support professionals working in the trenches of e-discovery.  You should consult Fios’ e-Discovery for Litigation Support page for more information. 

Fios has also been at the leading edge of cross-border eDiscovery and data privacy.   As we have reported in the past, U.S.-style litigation and internal investigations and e-discovery are largely alien to non-U.S. organizations.   Data collection also is far more complicated in an international context than in a purely domestic one.   We attended the Sedona conference in Barcelona last month (click here) and we had the opportunity to interview Ken Rashbaum who is a Director of Fios Consulting at Fios, Inc. and a leading expert in the area.   We’ll publish that interview next week when we post Part 5 of our Trends series (click here) and discuss opportunities in Europe for contract attorneys.