Contract attorneys: an asset never properly utilized

15 November 2011 – As we have written before (our most recent post is here) the most common complaints from the contract attorney world is that the work is mind-numbing and monotonous, affording none of the intellectual stimulation that a lawyer should expect.  There is often little or no quality control.  What supervision reviewers get usually has more to do with the schoolroom than with the law office, and generally focuses on production levels, tardiness, talking, number and length of breaks, etc.  Under those demoralizing conditions, mistakes are inevitable, and careless, unprofessional work is common. The result is the infamous McDermott case which has become a prime example of the myriad ethical problems in modern, assembly-line document review.   

Expanding on this theme, but with much more detail and with positive suggestions about what can be done and should be done, is Lawrence Chapin, an attorney with forty years experience in the law who has been working, for the last eighteen months, as a contract review lawyer on projects in New York City and Richmond, Virginia.  He is also a recent graduate of the e-Discovery Team Training program run by Ralph Losey.

In a special post on Ralph’s blog, Larry emphasizes that contract reviewers should become/can become more valuable to a project when they are wisely employed in a project.  Their talents and potential contributions to a project are often wasted.  

We all know that technology is driving much of the drudgery in document review.  But technology has become so important to the industry.  We recently attended the two premier corporate counsel events of the year, the IQPC Corporate Counsel Exchange in Amsterdam  and the Association of Corporate Counsel annual meeting in Denver which we will detail in two lengthy posts in the next two weeks.   Between the two events we had the opportuntity to chat with 35+ corporate counsel (we’ll include some video interviews in our upcoming posts) and discussed everything from the new role of corporate counsel, the overall need to reduce corporate legal spend, third-party funding of litigation, privacy issues and social media, and … most importantly … the technology they have brought in-house to control e-discovery cost and the technology their outside attorneys and consultants use overall for e-discovery.   One of the overriding themes from both events was:  “yes, we need lawyers (both in-house and temporary) but lawyers who are data geeks!!”  And by that they meant attorneys who can handle the technical aspects of modern legal data analysis, who have some computer science background, statistics and math skills, who have or can learn the skills for legal data visualization, imaginative ways to turn legal data into actionable intelligence. 

So could technology help to redeem the contract attorney industry?  Larry seems to think so.  He makes numerous excellent points and we urge you to read his full analysis.  For the full post click here.