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 [...]

1 August 2011 – Over the weekend we posted an update on the McDermott e-discovery malpractice case involving contract attorneys, vendors and privilege.  The case involves a allegedly botched privilege review.  For that post click here.  The response from the List was enormous.  We received 980+ emails commenting on our post and the case.   We have [...]

  7 March 2011 — In case you missed it over the weekend, the New York Times published an article titled “Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software” which discussed the “new e-discovery software that can analyze millions of documents in a fraction of the time, and at a fraction of the cost consumed [...]

19 January 2011 – A Connecticut state legislator is concerned that the outsourcing of legal work has taken jobs away from recent law school grads and introduced a bill to address the “doc review” situation.  Under her proposal “unlicensed” offshore workers who engage in the drafting, reviewing or analyzing of legal documents for clients in [...]

There were a number of articles on document review and contract attorneys last week.  The discuss the challenges faced by contract atorneys and legal support professionals, how to recruit for and manage document reviews, setting up workflows, etc.   Here are the links:  Challenges for Corporate eDiscovery/Litigation Support Professionals – http://bit.ly/bQR6TP Climbing Back – Socha and [...]

A contract lawyer is suing Labaton Sucharow alleging that the law firm violated federal labor laws by not paying time-and-a-half for overtime.  The contract lawyer, Moshe Koplowitz, said that Labaton Sucharow did not pay him at a higher rate when he worked more than 40 hours in a week.  Koplowitz has been doing contract work for a number of [...]

6 July 2010 —  There is an interesting article in today’s The Legal Intelligencer about the increasing use of using “project attorneys” and “contract attorneys” to handle an increased workload on shrinking budgets.  Bringing on specialized, experienced attorneys for six months to a year to handle one set project in their area of expertise has become [...]

22 June 2010 —  Some interesting stuff from the recently published Altman Weil survey of leaders of law firms with more than 50 lawyers.  Forty-four percent of the firms laid off associates last year, 53 percent reduced or discontinued hiring first-year associates, and 64 percent shrunk their summer associate programs.  This year, 10 percent of the [...]

Oil, oil, oil, oil …. As has been reported in the Wall Street Journal, Lawyer Weekly and various other sources, companies that potentially face civil or criminal liability for the Gulf of Mexico oil spill have hired a large cast of outside legal help, including former high-level government attorneys and a top product-liability lawyer.  BP [...]

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 [...]