5 December 2011 – It was a lovely press release:

      “The [ABA Section of Legal Education and Admission] is fully committed to clarity and accuracy of law   school placement data.  As a result of these changes, future law students will be better informed about their prospects than ever before.”

They even approved a new annual questionnaire intended to gather more detailed information about where recent law grads find work.  But the new questionnaire does not include all the changes that transparency advocates have been pushing for.  Law School Transparency — a nonprofit organization that seeks to improve consumer data for law students — has called upon the ABA to publish school-specific salary data that would allow prospective law students to see how much graduates of each school earn.  As with the old questionnaire, job and salary data will not be reported together and school-specific salary data will not be released publicly. Instead, each school will report the three states in which the largest number of its graduates finds jobs.

For a review of the ABA action from the National Law Journal click here.

For more about Law School Transparency click here. 

And for one of our previous posts which addressed many of these issues click here.

This is an element of the argument that law school is a bad decision which rests on two givens: the enormous debt incurred by most lawyers, and the lack of opportunity.   People rack up an average $92,000 in debt because of the implied promise of a high-paying job at the end.  For most pundits, a massive portion of law school applicants are extremely ill-informed about the career prospects resulting from a law degree.  

We covered all of these points in a post last year which you can access by clicking here.

And for a recent article on the law school debt bubble from AmLaw Daily click here.

24 May 2011 — Two items of note involving the ABA today in the legal media clippings:

ABA Proposes Big Changes for LL.M.s

Sitting for the bar exam may soon be trickier for the thousands of foreign-trained attorneys who take the test each year.  The New York Court of Appeals in April adopted stricter requirements for master of laws (LL.M.) programs, which help foreign lawyers gain eligibility to take the bar. The new rules focus primarily on the content of LL.M. programs, which many foreign attorneys use as an entry point into the domestic legal market.

At the same time, the American Bar Association’s Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar has proposed specific curriculum requirements for LL.M. programs geared toward foreign-trained lawyers. Individual states that adopt the proposed model rule would let graduates of those programs sit for their bar exams. That may result in an expansion of states admitting foreign attorneys, since few states beyond New York and California currently allow the LL.M.-to-bar exam path.  For the full article click here. 

ABA Accreditation for Law School in China Runs Up Against U.S. Job Fears 

And yet another story about the ABA and the accrediting of foreign schools and its affect on the market would undermine their L.L.M. programs.   Law schools say the lower-cost overseas schools could under-price U.S. schools, leading to a “race to the bottom”.   But the bigger issue is it runs headlong into the still-weak U.S. legal job market. Fears of a tide of new overseas competition for scarce work were evident in many of the 60 comments the ABA received in response to a special-committee report released last fall recommending the accreditation section begin considering foreign schools.  “As a long-time ABA member, I have no doubt why so many people refuse to join the association or leave shortly after joining,” says Kelly Drye & Warren partner Steven Moore.  For the full article click here.  

9 December 2010 – As the U.S. economy shows a slight pick up in activity, companies have started to hire temporary workers.  But with a difference.  After the trials and tribulations of being forced to lay off people during the recession, many companies do not plan to use temporary workers just for the recovery’s shaky beginnings – they plan to keep a large percentage of their workforce temporary permanently. 

Last week’s payroll data was grim — the unemployment rate rose to a seven-month high of 9.8 per cent.  But they also showed that the number of temporary workers continued to climb in the US last month. The economy added 40,000 temporary workers in November while the total workforce expanded by 39,000. Since temporary work reached its recent low in September 2009, 494,000 temporary jobs have been added, compared with an increase of 901,000 positions in the same period. 

Welcome to a structural shift, say the economists.  Temporary workers will be making up a larger proportion of the labor force.   Temporary employment is usually one step towards a permanent hire but this time around the use of temp workers looks a bit more permanent. 

This “resizing” of the economy includes the legal profession.  The recent Hildebrandt survey of the legal industry, the National Law Journal survey and ALM survey all showed a significant increase in “other” attorneys, defined as nonpartner and nonassociate lawyers.  Most of those surveys include temporary or contract attorneys.  

As we had previously reported, we heard from the temporary attorney war rooms that during the recession, in order to keep the troops busy, law firms gave their associates work that would have normally gone to contract attorneys.  But now, even as the economy continues to improve, the ranks of “other” attorneys continue to swell due to their lower cost and often more targeted experience. We have seen that as many contract attorneys with specialized experience move out of the document review rooms and into more substantive work. 

And — surprise! — employment agencies will be one major beneficiary of this change. Kelly Services has so far seen a 20-25 per cent rise in people placed in temporary work, compared to last year, a big chunk coming from the Kelly Law division.   Speaking about an across-the-board trend Carl Camden, chief executive of Kelly Services, was quoted as saying he thinks the temporary portion of the workforce will be higher at the top of this cycle than it was at the peak of the last:  “Chief executives around the world often say to me they had too high of a proportion of fixed rather than variable labor costs.  I see a pretty strong commitment by management to increase the proportion that are variable.” 

The FT recently chronicled the story of Stacey Mungo, a lawyer who started working on a temporary basis through Kelly Legal Services after she lost her job in a bank merger.  She plans to stick with temporary work because it enables her to work closer to home, giving her more time with her nine-year-old son.  

Yes, the downside.  It is not the same pay as her full time job.    But, she’s working.  And the adjustment is necessary.  Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, says this recovery is continuing the pattern of the last two by making more and more jobs temporary:  “Employers have shifted risk to employees and as many other employers as they can. What the system has learned to do is to be enormously more productive,” he said. “If you think this is temporariness you haven’t seen anything yet.”  

Shocking.  It’s all about money.

19 September 2010 — As we have stated numerous times in our ediscovery/data management “thought leaders” series (click here)  we face a tsunami of data.  For a good discussion of how this all evolved read our interview with the “Master Sensai E-Discovery Gurus” Ralph Losey and Jason R. Baron (click here)  and see their brilliant presentation Did You Know which you can access on YouTube (click here).

Yes, the amount of data is staggering.  As a further recent example, an August survey conducted by Symantec revealed that just backup tapes alone are storing documents on indefinite hold in enterprise libraries that would stretch to the moon and back 13 times with enough left over to circle the globe seven times (for the Symantec survey click here)    And according to the study storing all this data makes it harder to find what you’re looking for. It is now 1,500 times more expensive to review data than it is to store it, Symantec estimates. Backup windows, meanwhile, are so overloaded that weekend backups are taking more than a single weekend these days.

So, with the accelerating increase in electronically stored information along with the changes in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and the courts (Federal and state) tsunami of decisions, how do you control and manage the data?  Technology.  As a result, lawyers must become technologists. 

And you must become technology savvy if only for the simple reason to increase your abilities, advance your career — in other words propel your personal agenda.

Earlier this year Donna Seyle posted an article (you can read it on JDSupra by clicking here) in which she said lawyers must “embrace technology”.  While her article was geared toward the law firm and innovation she addressed the existing situation for all lawyers:  the massively influential rise of social media marketing, blogging, networking, data management, etc. demands it.  And no more so than those of us involved in e-discovery.

It is why we launched The Electronic Discovery Reading Room (click here)  to provide Posse List members a “go to” site which (hopefully) provides the information to learn about the tech behind e-discovery.  It is why we set up two job listservs that post jobs for lawyers needed in various legal technology areas and legal project management (to get on any of our lists follow the instructions posted on our site (click here).

You can do simple things like working your way through the Sedona Conference E-Discovery Glossary (now in its third edition) which is the most comprehensive e-discovery we have found.  It provides definitions/explanations of many terms commonly (and not so commonly) used in e-discovery and digital information management.  You can download it for free by clicking here. 

Or look at our weekly “Top 10 … plus more” list of interesting blog posts, and views on electronic discovery related issues and other tech developments from the past week (for our latest click here) and our “Vendor Clips” which provides vendor views and industry news from electronic discovery-centric vendors and commentators (for our latest click here)

And go to a legal technology conference near you.  All offer free admission to the exhibit hall (those that have them) where you can meet technology vendors, see the technology at work behind e-discovery, etc.  Many allow free access to students or limited 1-day passes for free admission.  We attend about 15 conferences a year in the U.S., and about 8 in Europe and Asia.  We meet vendors, gain info — and sign up vendors who post jobs on our job lists.

Note:  we receive media credentials from each conference which allows us to attend these conferences for free.  We then conduct interviews, attend seminars, etc. and post our coverage on this site.  If you’d like to assist The Posse List in covering conferences send your resume to media@theposselist.com

There are conferences all over the country and the world.  For example check out this list (with thanks to Rob Robinson of Orange Legal Technology who provide us an updated list on a weekly basis):

eDiscovery Events

SEPTEMBER

IBA: 14th Annual Competition Conference
September 17-18, 2010
Florence, Italy
Click here for more information.

IQPC: 8th Annual Cold Chain Distribution for Pharmaceuticals
September 20-23, 2010
Philadelphia, PA
Click here for more information.

Canadian Forum on Court Technology
September 22-23, 2010
Ottawa, Canada
Click here for more information.

ALM – Virtual LegalTech
September 23, 2010
Online
Click here for more information.

Second Annual Intermountain eDiscovery Conference
September 24, 2010
Salt Lake City, UT
Click here for more information.

Argyle Executive Forum: 2010 Chief Legal Officer Leadership Forum
September 29, 2010
Chicago, IL
Click here for more information.

OCTOBER

The Masters Conference
October 4-6, 2010
Washington, DC
Click here for more information.

2010 NFPA Annual Convention
October 7-10, 2010
Cherry Hill, NJ
Click here for more information.

Gartner Symposium: ITxpo 2010
October 17-21, 2010
Orlando, FL
Click here for more information.

EDRM Midyear Meeting
October 19-20-2010
St. Paul, MN
Click here for more information.

DRI Annual Meeting
October 20-24, 2010
San Diego, CA
Click here for more information.

The Sedona Conference:  Patent Litigation XI
Oct 21 – Oct 22, 2010
Phoenix, AZ
Click here for more information.

ACC Annual Meeting
October 24-27, 2010
San Antonio, TX
Click here for more information.

2010 Techno Forensics & Digital Investigations
October 25-26, 2010
Gaithersburg, MD
Click here for more information.

Sedona Conference, Antitrust Law & Litigation XII
October 28-29, 2010
Phoenix, AZ
Click here for more information.

NOVEMBER

InfoSecurity – Netherlands
November 3-4, 2010
Utrecht, Netherlands
Click here for more information.

InfoSecurity – Russia
November 17-19, 2010
Moscow, Russia
Click here for more information.

Gartner Identity and Access Management Summit
November 17, 2010
San Diego, CA
Click here for more information.

Gartner Data Center Summit
November 22-23, 2010
London, UK
Click here for more information.

DECEMBER

Gartner Data Center Conference
December 6-9, 2010
Las Vegas, NV
Click here for more information.

ALM – Virtual LegalTech
December 14, 2010
Online
Click here for more information.

As Ron Friedmann has noted, one of consequences of the paradigm shift in the legal industry is that “what is bad news for law firms could be good news for legal technology managers and legal technology professionals.”    Law departments must act to reduce legal spend.  If GCs don’t, CFOs and CEOs will step in.   Law firm have lost pricing power and face a battle for market share.  Winning that battle will require that firms offer clients more value.  To do so, firms will get serious about process improvement, project management, outsourcing, and alternative fees.  

As we have noted in numerous posts, law firms must deploy/have been deploying new technology and new expertise but also using  old technology more effectively.   This has required more business and technology professionals, in temporary/contract capacities.  And the existing contract attorney base — and its newest members — provide that. 

In the last year we have seen a spike in our membership coming from ex-BigLaw associates, former trial lawyers, government lawyers, forensics consultants, and others.   And more contract attorneys have moved into project management roles and information technology roles. 

And it is the reason that our job posts for substantive temporary legal work has increased dramatically.  For those on our job lists, you know that the legal recruitment industry is characterized by an enormous surge in demand for temporary legal professionals.  Our job lists have greatly expanded in both geographic range and subject areas.   

In spite of all the challenges we face in today’s job market, we are working in a part of the legal industry that is unusual because it is open to sharing and collaboration, through publications, quality conferences, and trade shows, and peer networking organizations.  Use these resources.   think outside the box.  Take part.

In an effort to cut expenses, WilmerHale has decided to “in-source” its business operations to Dayton, Ohio.  But other law firms could also benefit from relocating support staff and even attorneys to less costly locales beyond the urban hubs according to an article in yesterday’s Law360.  

The WilmerHale facilities, which are slotted to open in September, will house the majority of the firm’s finance, human resources, information technology, document review and practice management operations, which are currently spread out between its Boston, New York and Washington offices. 

And WilmerHale is not alone.  In 2002, Orrick Herrington opened a global operations center in Wheeling, West Virginia, a town of about 30,000 near Pittsburgh. The converted warehouse operates around the clock and holds the firm’s help desk, document and transcription production, billings and collections, payroll and other business functions.

For the full article from Law360 click here.  

This is a trend we have written about in numerous posts.  These smaller metropolitan areas come with lower price tags for rent, taxes and employee salaries.  As the Law360 article notes “given the economic beating the industry has taken in recent years, and the availability of sophisticated technology, it may finally be time for law firms to move their business operations — and even some legal work — to low-cost locales throughout the U.S.  This was a significant topic during our coverage of the Georgetown Law conference “Law Firm Evolution” (click here).   

Even with contract attorneys providing law firms the opportunity to cut their costs (and their clients’ costs) with respect to e-discovery, the expenditures can still be prohibitive, particularly in high-cost regions like D.C. and New York where the cost to maintain a document review is higher than elsewhere in the U.S.   As we have reported in the past, besides the state-of-the-art technology driving costs down, the drive to cut costs has led corporations and law firms to seek other ways to cover their e-discovery work — without sending it overseas.

These outsourcing discussions highlight a law firm or client’s desire to simply seek lower cost alternatives, and that has led to a growing development of in-sourcing (also called “farmshoring” or “onshoring”) by staffing projects in locales such as Atlanta, Charlotte, Columbus, Houston, Indiana, Tennessee and West Virginia, as well as working with law firms in smaller metropolitan areas where billable rates are lower but quality is just as high, or going with lower cost niche firms throughout the country. 

As Lumen Legal says in its recent white paper: “As such, the industry is re-thinking its cost-saving strategy even further, expanding it to ask not only who is performing document review, but where.  Companies are starting to accept that the location of the contract lawyers is irrelevant.”

And so we’ve seen this greater movement to “outsourcing” document reviews but to these “on shore” centers — to U.S.-licensed lawyers in less-populated, less expensive areas of the country.  It’s the alternative to offshoring that many clients and attorneys find unattractive.  Ohio, North Carolina, Tennessee and Texas, for instance, have a wealth of law schools, a supply of legal skills and legal services capacity, and housing document reviews is not as expensive as other regions.  And that’s why we’ve recently seen a surge in document reviews in Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio. 

We are certainly NOT discounting the power of offshore centers but there is also an undercurrent to stay in the U.S., but away from the metro centers.

To stay abreast of the jobs we post across the country, Europe and Asia subscribe to one (several) of our listservs by clicking here. 

Note:  next week we resume our “thought leaders” series (click here) with a joint interview:  Steven Berrent, Esq. (Director of Complex Case Services, WilmerHale) and Craig Carpenter (General Counsel of Recommind) who discuss.  Interviews to follow will include  John Tredennick of Catalyst,  Dean Gonsowski of Clearwell Systems, Brandon Daniels of CPA Global, Anne Kershaw and Patrick Oot of The eDiscovery Institute, George Socha (inventor of the Electronic Discovery Reference Model), Scott Holec of eTERA Consulting, Warwick Sharp of Equivio, Bobby Balachand of Exterro, Steve Akers of Digital Reef, Julia Brickell of H5, Greg O’Reilly of LDM Global,  James Schellhase of StoredIQ … plus many more.

As always, have a question or suggestion?  Email us at manager@theposselist.com.

Two Vanderbilt law students have created a new website where they hope to publish better job and salary information for all ABA-accredited law schools.  Students Patrick Lynch and Kyle McEntee say law schools hide their employment data in aggregate form. 

The two students have created a website called Law School Transparency where they hope to publish more specifics. They want to describe in more detail where law school graduates end up working each year and how much value they received from their degree.  In particular, they want each school to provide information about each student nine months after graduation that includes employer type, employer name, position name, whether bar passage is required or preferred, full-time or part-time status, office location, whether the student worked on a law journal, and salary. 

In a paper published at SSRN, Lynch and McEntee argue that summaries for each law school in the ABA’s official guide can be confusing. Prospective students looking at the summary table for a law school will see the number of grads employed in law firms, but they won’t be able to tell whether they were working as attorneys, law clerks, paralegals, contract attorneys or administrators. 

For the full article from the National Law Journal click here.

We all know about the paradigm shift in the legal industry.  It has been well chronicled by Richard Susskind,  Jordon Furlong, Ron Friedmann and many others.  The legal industry melt down, the deep and rapid technological advances (of the disruptive kind), our relentless connectivity and burgeoning electronic legal marketplace — all have led to major threats to various aspects of the traditional law firm business model. 

But Susskind’s “decomposition of legal tasks” into component parts that can be delegated to various sources — in-sourcing, relocating, offshoring, outsourcing, subcontracting — has had its biggest effect on contract attorneys who are a large part of our membership base.  And the problem is that for the majority of contract attorneys the bulk of their work is not substantive legal advice but highly structured/repetitive functions such as document review, research tasks and processing.   And while they benefit from outsourcing/subcontracting they also can suffer from it.   When firms find themselves in a financial pinch they slash those that they consider most dispensable: the contract lawyers, part-time lawyers, and support staff. 

Note:  as we have noted, most contract attorneys face two horrendous problems — the enormous debt incurred in attending law school, and the lack of opportunity.  People are racking up an average $92,000 in debt because of the implied promise of a high-paying job at the end, and industry predications indicate that there are likely to be less than 30,000 legal jobs available per year — with some 45,000 people graduating from law school every year.  Many blogs focus on the massive portion of law school applicants who are extremely ill-informed about the career prospects resulting from a law degree and nobody has covered these issues better than the Tom the Temp blog (click here) and the Third Tier Reality blog (click here) where both blogs provide statistics and links.  

But there is another side to all of this and that was recently observed by our industry colleague Gabe Acevedo, founder of Gabe’s Guide (click here).  In addition to blogging on his site, Gabe is also legal technology contributor to Above the Law, the doyenne of online legal tabloids.  Gabe has a knack for picking up on stories you’d probably miss on other sites, offers good comment, and has a large following … which is probably why ATL hired him. 

In his recent post for ATL entitled “BigLaw’s Status Issue” (click here) Gabe uses a post by Orrick partner Patricia Gillette as a jump to make the following points: 

1.   The wholesale termination of attorneys, based solely on their status, ignores the paradigm shift in the legal industry.   

2.  The rising, new demographics of the contract attorney market:  ex-BigLaw associates, former trial lawyers and government lawyers, retired law professors, and even some former partners. 

3.   Part-time lawyers, contract lawyers, and lawyers who don’t want to be partners but have a wealth of experience can provide an alternative, cost-effective way of accomplishing a lot of traditional legal work, echoing the thoughts of Richard Susskind and the other members of the “paradigm shift” mob. 

4.   The growing power of litigation support managers, many of whom are attorneys and — in fact — former contract attorneys. 

As Ron Friedmann has noted, one of consequences of the paradigm shift in the legal industry is that “what is bad news for law firms could be good news for legal technology managers and legal technology professionals.”    Law departments must act to reduce legal spend.  If GCs don’t, CFOs and CEOs will step in.   Law firm partners like Patricia Gillette “get it”:  firms have lost pricing power and face a battle for market share.  Winning that battle will require that firms offer clients more value.  To do so, firms will get serious about process improvement, project management, outsourcing, and alternative fees.  

As Gabe mentions in his post and as he has noted several times on his blog, law firms must deploy new technology and new expertise but also use old technology more effectively.   This will require more business and technology professionals, in temporary/contract capacities.  And the existing contract attorney base — and its newest members — provide that. 

We can support Gabe’s observations.  In the last year we have seen a spike in our membership coming from ex-BigLaw associates, former trial lawyers, government lawyers, forensics consultants, and others.   And more contract attorneys moved into project management roles. 

And it is the reason that our job posts for substantive temporary legal work has increased dramatically.  For those on our job lists, you know that the legal recruitment industry is characterized by an enormous surge in demand for temporary legal professionals.  This was recently highlighted by Adecco (click here).  Some of the most sought after temporary legal positions require candidates to have the experience of having worked in a corporate legal division or law firm.  We have also seen it in straight document review projects where law firms and corporations have asked for the requisite substantive experience to work on a project.  Our job lists have greatly expanded in both geographic range and subject areas (for our job lists click here). 

And one thing Gabe and I agree on:  in spite of all the challenges we face we are working in a part of the legal industry that is unusual because it is open to sharing and collaboration, through publications, quality conferences, and trade shows, and peer networking organizations.  Use these resources.   We profile them constantly on our various pages.

Gregory Bufithis, Esq.   Founder/Chairman  The Posse List

The prospects for an accelerating global economic recovery were supported on Wednesday as Adecco, Swiss-based and the world’s largest temporary staffing group, said employment trends had been improving in recent weeks.  Adecco’s legal division includes contract attorney staffing agencies Ajilon Legal and Special Counsel, the latter of which it acquired through its acquisition of the MPS Group last year.

The group’s comments followed upbeat sentiment from Manpower (U.S.-based) and Randstad (Netherlands-based), the world’s other two dominant “temping” groups.  The three companies are seen as economic bellwethers,  their fortunes reflecting demand from big industrial and service sector clients around the world.   As a spokesman for Adecco said “in downturns, such customers first reduce contract labor, before cutting full-time workforces. Similarly, when demand rises, they take on temporary staff before starting to rehire permanent labor”.   Now that most countries have emerged from recession, employment, which lags a recovery, should follow – first with temporary placements and then with permanent hires.    Adecco suggests this process has begun in the legal markets.

But this uptick in contract attorney work is also due to the paradigm shift in the legal industry which we and other sites have well chronicled which includes a movement toward the use of temporary/project attorneys for substantive work at both law firms and corporations.   It is the reason that our job posts for substantive temporary legal work has increased dramatically.    Last month, Manpower reported improving trends in all temporary worker markets, including legal.  

But Adecco’s fate is increasingly intertwined with that of  North America, especially the U.S.   Last year the continent contributed 15 per cent of the company’s revenue and the acquisition of MPS is expected to increase that amount to almost 20 per cent.   

It could mark one of the biggest changes for lawyers joining the profession since the first U.S. bar examination was given in Delaware in 1763 — a single bar exam aimed at standardizing attorney credentials nationwide. Next year, at least 10 states are expected to switch to the Uniform Bar Exam, and 22 other jurisdictions are positioned to adopt the test in the next few years. The test will allow law school graduates to transport their bar scores across state lines without re-taking exams.

For full story click here:  http://sn.im/sh6mn

One refuge for many contract attorneys has been direct employment as a staff attorney at a number of firms that adopted the “staff attorney” model for document review and temporary work.

But as Above the Law has continued to report, one casualty of the economic recession could well be the position of staff attorney.  They have reported that Skadden and Covington have had major cuts to their staff attorney programs, and now Paul Weiss.  According to Above the Law apparently they need to cut all the staff attorneys “so they have some work for 80 or so first years that just started who are already doing nothing but doc review and who should expect to be doing nothing but doc review for the foreseeable future”.

For the full post from Above the Law click here.