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.

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 written a number of posts about the technological changes that have reshaped the legal industry (we hesitate to call it a profession) with a focus on what Richard Susskind, Ralph Losey and Jordon Furlong (among others) have wriiten about these past few years:  the deep and rapid technological advances (of the disruptive kind) that have led to relentless connectivity, the burgeoning electronic legal marketplace and the “decomposition of legal tasks” into component parts that can be delegated to various sources: in-sourcing, relocating, offshoring, outsourcing, subcontracting.  It has led to reducing costs for repetitive processes such as regulatory filings, document review, etc.  It has simply commoditized large sections of the law, especially document review. 

The law simply became another business, just a Law Factory.  It took the precepts of Clayton Christensen’s The Innovators Dilemma who introduced one of the most influential business ideas of our time — “disruptive innovation”, penned in 1996.   In the case of document review law firms adopted the cost-saving manufacturing principle of “just-in-time” production, and applied it to a service industry: hire attorneys “just when you need them” but only on a short-term, part-time basis.  And to make it even further removed from any hint of a profession move it to “managed review” and document review centers and out of the realm of law firms.

Result?  The McDermott case.  As many of you wrote, this case is a prime example of the myriad ethical problems in modern, assembly-line document review.   

And that’s what document reviews are today: performance under under assembly-line conditions by temps (not always lawyers) who often work 60 or 70 hours a week, ten or twelve hours a day, at rates ranging from $12.50 to $35 an hour (for English-language reviews) who are summarily fired if they fail to meet arbitrary production quotas. 

As several of you wrote:  “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.” 

A large number of you  pointed out reviews in DC and New York where reviewers were improperly instructed on privilege by  junior associates and/or case administrators who obviously did not know the difference between the attorney-client privilege and the attorney-work-product doctrine.  The general response?  Above our pay grade.  Don’t target yourselves by pointing out that masses of privileged communications that will be produced as a result.   We need this job.

The “schoolroom” working conditions and poor training can only be demoralizing for lawyers and will do nothing but produce indifference to standards of “professional” competence.

And as several of you said “instead of addressing these problems by improving working conditions, quality control, etc., the legal staffing agencies seem to be responding by requiring temps to sign indemnification agreements, whereby the temps agree to hold the agencies and their clients, the law firms, harmless against all claims arising out of the temps’ work”.  Normally, employers buy liability insurance to cover the errors and omissions of their employees.  This oppressive tactic reverses that arrangement, and makes the individual employee the insurer of his or her employer and its client. 

And let’s face it:  temps aren’t paid enough to cover malpractice insurance, so those who sign such contracts are simply hoping nothing bad will happen.  The McDermott case names 100 John Doe lawyers as defendants, presumably referring to the temps who worked on that review.  But one good thing is that according to Hudson they do not require temps to sign indemnification agreements.  If they had, those 100 John Does would be looking at the possibility of thousands of dollars in personal liability, for which McDermott’s malpractice insurer would certainly pursue them.  Remember that when asked to sign an indemnification agreement.

The case slogs on.  We keep you up-to-date best we can.

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 by human lawyers, even deducing patterns of behavior”.   It discussed issues that are not news to us in the market:  the explosion of electronically stored information, the technology used to analyze that data (mentioning Autonomy, Blackstone Discovery, Cataphora and Clearwell Systems) and how all this has disrupted the legal job market (on the heels of the legal sector losing 2,900 jobs in February in the latest report).  

For the full New York Times article click here. 

And as the article rocketed across Twitter, Facebook, JDSupra, etc. over the weekend a number of the leading lights of e-discovery and technology offered their critiques of the article.  Here are just a few: Ralph Losey, Ron Friedmann, Randall Parker and Stephen Levy.

As we have discussed in numerous past posts, the significant impact of this technology has been not on what the New York Times calls the “expensive” lawyers but on those of us in the lowest paid band  -  contract lawyers. 

When we started The Posse List in 2002 our base was contract attorneys, the lawyers who worked on document review and production — the “right side” of the EDRM.   These cases required an army of attorney and paralegal document reviewers — called in like a “posse” at the last minute, as needed.   Law firms adopted the cost-saving manufacturing principle of “just-in-time” production, and applied it to a service industry: hire attorneys “just when you need them” but only on a short-term, part-time basis. 

But as document processing and analysis technology improved, the need for these large numbers dwindled.  But there was an increase in the need for greater sophistication and expertise in ESI management and e-discovery.   Now our members include contract attorneys, forensics consultants, paralegals, in-house counsel, law firm attorneys, solo practitioners, all manner of e-discovery companies, legal media entities, and numerous legal support professionals.   

The first task in any transition to to understand the technology.  All of us have been exposed to some of the technical hurdles that litigation support teams face, but you need a deeper understanding of them.  One way to do that is learn how data is processed for a case.  We post numerous webinars, webcasts and events on technical training.    

As Ralph Losey says in his critique of the New York Times article, attorneys need to retool.  Quoting Ralph: “The new technologies advancing search and review automation discussed in the story do not replace “expensive lawyers” as alleged. The new software does, however, force lawyers to learn new, more highly skilled tasks. The article seems to overlook the fact that the advanced e-discovery search and review technologies all still require lawyers to operate. They still require skilled attorneys to fit the technologies into a larger legal methodology. They still require the ESI to be understood. The software programs do not run themselves. They are only a tool. They are just a hammer, and without a carpenter, they will not build a case on their own”.

It is why at The Posse List we have been publishing posts which we hope are found helpful such as A lawyer must be a technologist and Transitioning from law practice to more technical litigation support.

You need to grasp the technical challenges that are presented by the data processing process.  Along the same lines, learn about data acquisition and preservation methodologies. You know how important a chain of custody is and why the hash value of the data you present in court needs to match what was initially acquired.  But can you make a bitstream copy of a client’s hard drive with a full audit trail? 

The biggest issue for attorneys making the transition is the need to bridge the gap between legal and technical within e-discovery.   Access our Electronic Reading Room site (click here) to bone up on the basics – and the advanced bits – of e-discovery.

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.  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 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 go to our home page and click on “Subscribe” in the top right-hand column).

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 e-discovery blog posts, and vendor views on electronic discovery related issues which provides vendor views and industry news from electronic discovery-centric vendors and commentators (for the latest from both 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.  There are conferences all over the country and the world and we post a list every week.

Our membership list is diverse – contract attorneys, forensics consultants, paralegals, in-house counsel, law firm attorneys, solo practitioners, e-discovery companies, legal media entities, and numerous legal support professionals — and we are trying to be helpful to all of our members.   

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 Connecticut could be charged with unauthorized practice of law.

The general consensus is that overseas legal work is here to stay.   But not everyone is happy about the legal outsourcing trend.   Well, duh.   Scott Bullock, a contract lawyer who has blogged about the woeful economics of non-big-firm practice, prertty much sums it up:  “It’s just preposterous that we have to go to an American law school and pass a bar exam and then see our jobs shipped overseas. Why even require people to go to law school?”

For full article from The Connecticut Law Tribune click here.

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: 

1. Challenges for Corporate eDiscovery/Litigation Support Professionals – http://bit.ly/bQR6TP
2. Climbing Back – Socha and Tom Gelbmann Highlight Key Trends Identified in Annual eDiscovery Survey – http://tinyurl.com/29yxwbj
3. Discovery vs. Document Review Is Value vs. Cost – http://tinyurl.com/2fea5l7
4. E-Discovery: Opt For Major Changes Rather Than Tinkering At The Edges Of The Rules – http://tinyurl.com/269e4of
5. Managing Lawyers – Choose Review Attorneys Carefully; Treat Them Well – http://tinyurl.com/275s73m
6. Setting Up Review Workflows for Multi-Language Documents – http://tinyurl.com/2bem3bb

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 years and is about 10 years out of law school.  A review of the case from the New York Times can be found by clicking here.  There are also some excellent comments to the article.

NYC Posse List members will remember Labaton Sucharow from the large Countrywide class action document review.  Which is kind of interesting since Koplowitz’s suit seeks to become a class action.

We spoke with the lawyer who drafted the complaint, D. Maimon Kirschenbaum, who said that federal law required employees paid by the hour to receive one-and-a-half times their regular pay for every hour over 40 hours worked in a week.  To read the complaint click here.

As we discussed with Kirschenbaum, the cases rests on whether document review constitutes the practice of law.  Under Federal law it hinges on:

§ 541.304 Practice of law or medicine. 

    (a) The term “employee employed in a bona fide professional capacity” in section 13(a)(1) of the Act also shall mean:  (1) Any employee who is the holder of a valid license or certificate permitting the practice of law or medicine or any of their branches and is actually engaged in the practice thereof;

Under state law it hinges on 12 NYCRR § 142-2.14 which reads as follows:

(iii) Professional. Work in a bona fide professional capacity means work by an individual:

(a) whose primary duty consists of the performance of work: requiring knowledge of an advanced type in a field of science or learning customarily acquired by a prolonged course of specialized intellectual instruction and study, as distinguished from a general academic education and from an apprenticeship, and from training in the performance of routine mental, manual or physical processes; or

original and creative in character in a recognized field of artistic endeavor (as opposed to work which can be produced by a person endowed with general manual or intellectual ability and training), and the result of which depends primarily on the invention, imagination or talent of the employee; and

(b) whose work requires the consistent exercise of discretion and judgment in its performance; or

(c) whose work is predominantly intellectual and varied in character (as opposed to routine mental, manual, mechanical or physical work) and is of such a character that the output produced or the result accomplished cannot be standardized in relation to a given period of time.

Tom the Temp has reported on this story and there is a stream of comments on his site that discuss the various issues that may or may not be involved in the case.  For those comments click here.

This all reminds us of the Preston Gates & Ellis case (now K&L Gates LLP and yes — that’s Bill Gates father) where the firm agreed to settle a lawsuit alleging violations of the wage and hour laws. The suit was filed on behalf of over 300 lawyers who were employed by the firm to review electronic documents that were the subject of discovery requests in lawsuits. The gist of the case was that the law firm treated the lawyers as professionals who were exempt from the overtime laws as a result of their professional status, but the lawyers claimed that their work did not require them to use their professional skills, thereby making them nonexempt hourly workers. The settlement reportedly involved a payout of $700,000. The firm denied violating the law and told the media at the time that it would be easier and more cost-effective to settle the case than to fight it.

The reason that lawsuit was important is that it illustrated that even sophisticated employers can find themselves in a costly dispute over whether employees have been properly classified under federal and state wage and hour laws. The suit also illustrates that it is the actual work performed by employees that matters, not the amount of education or training that the employees have or the label that is placed on the work. The issues in the Preston Gates & Ellis case could arise in any workplace with exempt employees, even if they are not professionals. Misclassifying executive or administrative employees could have the same result.

Note to New York Posse List members:  has anyone seen a citation, case or reference that New York law does not recognize document review as the practice of law?  We know this is an issue for out-of-state lawyers trying to waive into New York.  Let us know your experiences and if you can e email us a cite/reference:  manager@theposselist.com.

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 the solution.  For the full article click here.

This is trend we recently posted about (click here) and that have reported on extensively in the past year (see for example here) and that we discussed in detail at the Georgetown Law conference “Law Firm Evolution” (click here).   It is what pundits in the industry call the “decomposition of legal tasks” into component parts that can be delegated to various sources — in-sourcing, relocating, offshoring, outsourcing, subcontracting — and it has had its biggest effect on contract attorneys who are a large part of our membership base.   But the trend is substantive legal work and not the highly structured/repetitive functions such as document review, research tasks and processing that most contract/project attorneys fit into. 

And it is the reason that our job posts for substantive temporary legal work has increased dramatically.  And 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. The Legal Intelligencer quotes James LaRosa of JuriStaff (a large player who places a lot of attorneys with relevant experience/real life practice experience in temporary substantive positions) but subscribers to The Posse List job lists know that other major players include Adecco (who we recently covered here) CPA Global, Firm Advice, Legal Placements, Lumen Legal and Pat Taylor.  (To subscribe to our job lists click here.  It’s free).   

It is not surprising there is a lot of activity on the corporate contract side.  Corporations really started the project attorney/contract attorney legal process outsourcing industry in the early 1990s (my first temp project was directly for Dupont in 1991 on a product lability case) and was pioneered by companies like Dow Chemical, Dupont, GE, IBM, Pfizer, etc. — companies that had a raft of product liability litigation.  And they — naturally — pioneered offshoring.  Law firms joined in like gangbusters and since the industry sort of came of age through law firms in the late 1990s that’s what most of today’s contract attorneys mark it — law firms as the forerunner. 

But it is the corporation that has seized the need to reduce the outside legal spend by using temporary attorneys in house more and more for valuable use such as contract review, legal research and analysis, merger and acquisition due diligence work, drafting agreements, as well as the standard electronic discovery requests.  That is the shift we are seeing.

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 firms plan to cut associates, 38 percent plan to reduce or discontinue hiring first-year associates, and 54 percent plan to shrink their summer programs.

But the more interesting news was that law firms are expressing a “growing enthusiasm” for a staffing alternative —contract lawyers.  Last year, 39 percent of the law firms used contract lawyers.   This year, 53 percent will or might do so, while 52 percent expect that contract lawyers will become a permanent part of their staffing plans.

And firms are less enthusiastic about outsourcing or “offshoring” their legal work.   Fewer than 10 percent reported using either alternative. “Despite the potential for cost savings, law firms remain highly skeptical of outsourcing and offshoring and will likely only adopt them when pushed by clients to do so” said the press release accompanying the survey.

For an article from the ABA Journal with a link to the survey click here.

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 has tapped former U.S. deputy attorneys general Jamie Gorelick and Mark Filip to represent the oil company before Congress and the Justice Department, respectively.  Transocean Ltd. has retained John Beisner of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP, who represented Ford Motor Co. in litigation involving Explorer sport-utility vehicles and exploding Firestone tires.  He also helped Merck & Co. in litigation over its prescription pain killer, Vioxx.

Legal bills for BP, Transocean, contractor Halliburton Co. and others are mounting as the companies navigate the preliminary stages of a Justice Department criminal inquiry as well as myriad suits filed by fishermen, shrimpers and others who say their livelihoods have been harmed by the spill. 

Gorelick, who now is at WilmerHale, worked at Justice during the Clinton administration and also is a former general counsel for the Defense Department.  She has represented BP before Congress in recent years and will do so now as the company faces a thicket of regulatory and congressional hearings. 

Filip worked at Justice under Bush II.  He and Richard Godfrey, both partners at Kirkland & Ellis, will represent BP in matters concerning the Justice Department as well as the U.S. Marine Board of Investigations. 

Thomas Milch at Arnold & Porter is representing BP on environmental issues. 

Transocean’s team includes Ned Kohnke and Edwin Preis Jr. of Preis & Roy PLC in New Orleans, Ivan Schlager of Skadden and David Wochner and Rachel Clingman of Sutherland Asbill & Brennan. 

There has also been an oil slick of articles concerning the various e-discovery issues such as this one from LegalWeek.com (click here to download)  which quotes some of the major players in e-discovery:  Jim Wagner (CEO of DiscoverReady), Laura Kibbe (senior vice president of document review services at Epiq Systems), Craig Carpenter (general counsel of Recommind), Wendy Curtis (chair of Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe’s e-discovery Working Group), Amor Esteban (a partner at Shook Hardy & Bacon with expertise in e-discovery and data management), and Sanjay Bhandari (partner at Ernst & Young in London).  

Plus the talk that BP is a take-over candidate (click here).   

Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, a private consultant for energy companies told Congress that any effort to rewrite oil spill liability laws retroactively would likely face a legal challenge based on breach-of-contract claims.  If  successful, those breach-of-contract claims could cost the federal government billions of dollars in payments to the oil and gas industry.  The Senate Judiciary Committee is considering legislation to lift limits on damage awards.   For the full story from law.com click here.

Data/document collection has begun in the U.S., and in Europe.  Several sites are tracking all of this litigation and we will keep you posted.  It appears the litigation may be situated in Houston (click here) although a few law firms we spoke with said the doc reviews will be across the U.S.  Given the law firms mentioned in the first paragraph of this post (Skadden, WilmerHale, A&P) we can assume (granted, assumptions are always dangerous in doc review predictions) that D.C. will get a good chunk of the work since these firms use D.C. doc review centers for most of their work. 

And let’s not for get all that subprime/financial crisis litigation 

And on top of The Oil Follies we have all the financial litigation we have previously chronicled: the increase in U.S. government data requests from the DOJ and the SEC, compliance audits and investigations at both the state and federal level, hundreds of private litigations, etc.  Most of this work has been in DC with a chunk in NYC.  In fact the DC agencies have been screaming for bodies with the busiest agencies being  Compliance, Hudson Legal, Kelly Law Registry, Legal Assets, Legal Placements, and Pat Taylor.  You can find their contact email by clicking here.   

Over in Europe we have seen the launch of the first large doc reviews involving European banks and financial institutions (projects in Brussels, Geneva, London, Luxembourg, Munich) with more to come. 

Oh, yes.  There are the EU target investigations of the energy, tech, and drug markets (the EU has stepped up antitrust enforcement in the technology, energy, drug and transportation sectors); the LCD makers cartel investigation, etc. 

And the continuing surge in foreign language document review projects 

As we have indicated in numerous posts over the last year, foreign language document reviews have dominated the U.S. contract attorney market due to the continuing increase in FCPA cases and IP litigation.  It has provided a steady stream of work from firms such as A&P, Baker & McKenzie, Finnegan Henderson, Kirkland & Ellis, WilmerHale, etc. who have strong FCPA practices, and IP practices. 

For some of our new members, FCPA doc review work in a nutshell:

▪  Foreign language document reviews made up 78% of Posse List postings last year, and over 40% of those were FCPA related.   And we use the term FCPA broadly because it isn’t only FCPA violations per se.   These cases include money laundering, wire fraud, antitrust laws, private party civil litigations, etc.   

▪  As we have previously reported, the DOJ brought a record 26 actions in 2009; the SEC brought another 14, its second-most ever. The DOJ cases included prosecutions of 44 individuals—a huge surge from just nine in 2008, 10 in 2007, and six in 2006.  There are 130+ cases on track in 2010. 

▪    In Europe we have seen a surge in multi-jurisdiction prosecutions with co-operations between countries.  And we have seen increased industry and sector-wide investigations which has cross-border implications. 

In the U.S., that flood of requests for CJK (Chinese Japanese Korean) fluent attorneys (especially Japanese) on our various job lists is due not only to the Toyota litigations but also the continuing increase in IP cases and “case specific” investigations such as the one resulting from the FBI raids in various Michigan locations of Japanese suppliers. 

We have 1,800 Posse List members on the CJK lists (attorneys and paralegals) and based our market research and feedback from Posse List members there are 15-20 CJK projects in the major CJK document review markets:  Boston, Chicago, Detroit, DC, LA, NYC, and San Francisco.  

Note: the highest paying agency for Japanese fluent contract attorneys with a continuing demand in DC, NYC and elsewhere: Merrill Brink.  They are paying $63 an hour plus OT.  They also offer a signing bonus and completion bonus.  They also have a need for other languages.  Contact: Vanessa.Vidunas@merrillcorp.com 

And there is boatload (iPad load?) of litigation brewing involving Google, Apple and some other high-tech stalwarts.  We have attended several telecom/media conference in the U.S. and Europe and we’ll post more on that in a later edition.

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