A tribute to Gabe Acevedo

Gabe and I at Legaltech New York 2010. Gabe is the more commanding presence on the right.

(photo taken by Mary Mack)

By:

Gregory Bufithis
Founder/Executive Chairman
The Posse List

Gabe Acevedo died after a brief illness. A few thoughts about a dear friend.

11 February 2021 (Chania, Crete) – When I began The Posse List in January 2002 it had a simple mission: to help attorneys find temporary legaltech work and other temporary legal work until they found permanent gigs. The e-discovery industry was just coming into its own (ah, remember “The Condordance Era”?). It started with 33 people at a document review at Morgan Lewis in Washington, DC – my first-ever document review. I had *somewhat* retired after a career in the TMT (telecommuncations-media-technology) industry but my wife wanted me out of the house. A friend told me about “e-discovery document review” and so … a new career was born.

I had a lot of time on my hands so after the Morgan Lewis gig I collected the email addresses from those 33 comrades and I began to canvass staffing agencies and law firms to look for document reviews and litigation support positions and send out job notices to that group, plus others who joined along the way. It started as a Yahoo Group but grew too large and so I moved it to its own web site.

But this “thing” did not have a name. And then .. suddenly it did. At another document review I was busily playing with drop down menus when there was a tap on my shoulder:

ME: Yes?

VOICE: Hey. I’m Gabe Acevedo.

ME: Yes?

GABE: I want to join your posse.

ME: My what?

GABE: Your Posse. Your job list.

ME: Posse?

GABE: Yeah. You know. Like the John Wayne movies. 

And so a name was born. 

Yes, the name “Posse” came from that Old Western trope: the classic image of a posse, a group of armed cowboys on horses, pulled together at the last minute by the local sheriff, all in pursuit of an outlaw. Pretty much how document reviews were thrown together. And, in most cases, still thrown together.

NOTE: originally the term was “posse comitatus”, Latin meaning “the force of the country”. Today, the word posse is used most often to refer to a group of friends or people with some common interest, in a somewhat joking way, like “your posse that gets together to hit all the pubs”.

The rest is history. We added paralegal positions, forensic positions, project management positions, compliance positions, general counsel/assistant general counsel positions, intellectual property audit reviews/patent prosecution, M&A due diligence reviews, contract review, analysis and drafting, general corporate housekeeping – pretty much everything across the legal employment field. Membership grew beyond contract attorneys, paralegals, and litigation support personnel to include in-house counsel, law firm partners and staff attorneys, solo practitioners, e-discovery tech vendors and staffing agencies, legal media entities, law school recruitment offices and numerous legal support professionals. Jobs and information posts now go out to every region: U.S., Canada, South America, Europe, Middle East, Persian Gulf and Asia Pacific. We added a unit to handle special projects, legal surveys, and news analysis/metrics about the legal market which is provided to our legal vendor/staffing agency clients and our law firm/corporate clients. That work has only spiked.

And Gabe made significant contributions to these efforts:

• He helped me set-up a network of trusted contract attorneys in the D.C. and NYC review markets who reported on the daily “Good, Bad and Ugly” at document reviews. This was eventually expanded nationwide, and now includes law firm staff attorneys, per Gabe’s suggestion.

• We began attending legaltech conferences together (he as an employee of Above the Law). Gabe introduced me to David Latt and the Above the Law team which became a tremendous resource and we eventually traded news and information. It led to introductions at The American Lawyer and The Washington Post which led to their pieces on contract lawyers and the feeling of modern-day serfdom. I owe Gabe my thanks for that.

• He was also writing for his own blog, GabesGuide, as well as for Above the Law. He often ran drafts by me for comment, and referenced my own Posse List writing. He was the first to write an in-depth piece on whether the e-discovery industry should have its own specialized certification.  His pieces on legaltech buzzwords are still a delight. And a few years ago we began working on a piece about the new kind of AI language translation agency that is transforming the language industry and to which law firms and in-house corporate legal departments are gravitating.

But most importantly Gabe informed my own writing. Just one example. A number of years ago I  chronicled the deaths of contract attorneys Jamal Rashad and Richard Brown, who worked long hours, had inadequate or no health insurance, had pre-existing medical ailments and whom died (I thought) partially due to their contract attorney “profession”. I drafted a long piece (ok, more of as rant) “NOTE TO THE POMPOUS FATHEADS AT SEDONA” which squawked “quit with your stifling academic conversations about proportionality and computer assisted reviews and come visit the trenches!” 

Gabe advised “tone it down. Make it Big Picture”. From the original piece:

One thing I have learned, as have many in the e-discovery market: the collective intelligence and cognitive abilities of the contract attorney group can be unmatched.

Yes, contract attorneys are often maligned, sometimes with good cause. But the streets of American cities are haunted by their ghosts, destroyed by the thugs of commerce and technology. Amid the bacchanal of “legal disruption”, let us pause to honor those most disrupted. They hover between a decent poverty and an indecent one; they are expected to render the fruits of their labors for little, sometimes nothing. And I use the word nothing” when you tote up the net effect of daily cost-of-living expenses, loan repayments, etc.

Advancing technology has its blame. And the chimera called the legal “profession”. But the more immediate culprit is the institutionalization of an economic model so focused on quick, self-serving rewards, and so inured to long-term social costs. In America it’s all about the money, only about the money.

This is a land far removed from the rarified air of LegalTech, or a Sedona conference, or the perfect e-discovery world described in articles in the Richmond Journal of Law & Technology.

No other Western country – and this the richest, most powerful in the world – saddles its youth, when they are least able to the pay it, with the monstrous debt load that exists today.

Because the contract attorney market pulls you into life patterns that gradually degrade the ways in which each of us exist as an individual. And nobody has enough clout to stand up for themselves.

Gabe liked it but suggested this which I put in the final piece:

The Posse List? Well, we can never win with some members. Hundreds of Posse List members scream at us about low hourly rate postings: “How can you post that?! That rate?! What are you doing?!”

And then on the opposite side, the hundreds of members thanking us for posting jobs — any jobs — because they can pay their student loan, their rent, their mortgage, their alimony, their kids schooling, finally get health insurance, etc., etc.

The Posse List’s responsibility? To shove as many positions/opportunities out there as we can so members can work. Increasingly we have expanded so many of the jobs we post are not the “usual suspects” but have been positions sometimes only tangentially related to the law but where a law background can be useful.

As Gabe said in an email:

Dude, I get your point. You get it. We have been destroyed by the thugs of commerce and technology. Amid the bacchanal of “legal disruption”, as you say. But for many of us temp legal work is the only route (and many of us actually like the lifestyle) and The Posse List helps us. You have a bitch of an issue: balancing the needs of two-sides of the market . 

There was a personal side, too. He was thrilled when his Dad finally got U.S. citizenship and he detailed the whole process. Likewise his adoption of Ethan, one of the supreme loves of his life along with his wife Magdalena and daughter Miracle.

I moved to Europe in 2005 and for awhile I made 3-4 four trips back to the U.S. each year. When I was in the D.C. area I made it a point to hook up with Gabe for a coffee, or lunch, or dinner … and he usually had 2-3 Posse List members in tow so I could hear the latest document review rants.

A few years ago I left day-to-day Posse List operations and the e-discovery world, and reduced my trips to the U.S. to one a year and so my contacts with Gabe faded, other than a catch-up phone call every now and then. We were last in touch about 2 years ago.

Gabe’s death has pinged me a bit more, maybe, than others in the e-discovery community. I have now lost two key people from that industry who impacted me the most professionally and personally: Nigel Murray to whom I paid tribute here, and now Gabe. 

I know we shall all walk this path but I am still devastated. With Gabe’s death, we are slightly more impoverished than we were yesterday.