18 December 2011 — As we reported a few weeks ago, the A.B.A.  has been peppered of late with a number of accusations over its failings, not least of which is that it has not done enough to prevent law schools from overstating the current job prospects of graduates.  As expected, it caved into the demands of law schools with a watered down proposal.  We reported on this in an earlier post with several links to the law schol debt issue and the economics of law school.  For that earlier post here.     

Further, there has been a heated exchange between Cooley Law School and the organization Law School Transparency about the economics of going to law school.  You can see those links by clicking here.

And in today’s New York Times a brilliant piece on the incestuous relationships between the A.B.A., the law schools and the legal community.  As you read it we are sure you will feel like you are reading the story of Opus Dei in The Da Vinci Code, the history of the House of Medici, the workings of Tammany Hall and the Spanish Inquisition … all rolled into one.  For the full New York Times piece, click here.

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.

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.

10 August  2011 — One of the more contentious issues in e-discovery is the value of e-discovery certification.  Rebecca James, Esq. (Program Manager at Fios, Inc.) has been running a series on that topic.   As she points out while “there was skepticism and a lack of consensus on the importance of credentialing … minds were generally open to this growing trend.”  The series covers all views, pro and con, and includes all the leading experts and pundits in the e-discovery world. 

Part 1 queried lawyers on the topic (click here) 

Part 2 queried litigation support leaders (click here)    

Part 3 is the feedback from the leaders of the credentialing organizations and a look inside the e-discovery certification programs (click here).

And for a good source of e-discovery material access the Fios Knowledge Center (click here).

30 July 2011 — As we had reported in a previous post, the world’s first e-discovery malpractice lawsuit was filed in State Court in California against McDermott Will & Emery.  The case has been rocketing around the internet, striking fear in the heart of the e-discovery community.  The case involves a privilege filter through which all the collected documents were reviewed that reportedly was botched and resulted in McDermott delivering to the US government “documents that were not responsive to [government] subpoenas and were also attorney-client privileged.”  An amended complaint has just been filed with more details about the review, the contract attorneys hired, etc.

For a summary of the case from the Association of Certified E-Discovery Specialists web site click here.

For some excellent analysis on the case (plus much more) from Ralph Losey (with some cool links to Lady Gaga) 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.  

27 April 2011  [updating our January 2011 post]

The global “patent arms wars”

Ah, litigation.  Truly the sincerest form of flattery.  If you have been following all the IP litigation out there the last few months you know that the most recent battle pits Apple who has gone after Samsung for violating 10 iPhone and iPad-related patents in its Android-based smartphones and Galaxy Tab.  And Samsung has countersued, starting off with lawsuits in Europe and Asia, with U.S. based lawsuits about to be filed. 

The subtext is obvious.  Apple to Samsung:  you are an unexpectedly persistent competitor, and we don’t much like that.  But for both companies, legal fights are nothing out of the ordinary. Since the beginning of 2008 the tally of U.S. cases in which either side has been a party reads: Samsung 259, Apple 260.  And if you are a contract attorney who has been in the document review game long enough you have probably been in a few of these litigations … conflicts checks not withstanding. 

It is a strategy.  For Apple, another tool in the tool box to check the rise of its biggest challenger in tablets, and the dominant user of Android, the rival operating system to Apple’s own iOS.  Apple’s fear:  Samsung’s proven ability to accelerate penetration into mid-market segments in both developed and emerging economies, across all manner of consumer electronics.  

The “patent arms wars” have reached a new level of intensity.   It’s the globalization of smartphone patent disputes.  Because the most aggressive corporate asset these days is your IP arsenal and it has affected the subjective document review market.   The financial crises has “helped” in its own way, forcing many companies to look at IP commercialization and protection.  But no surprise here.  As we have shifted from a labor-driven economy to a knowledge-based economy the intangible assets produced by a more highly skilled and services-orientated workforce have emerged as the most powerful asset class, overtaking traditional capital assets such as real property, plant and equipment.  A lovely setting for a battleground.

As we have indicated in numerous posts over the last year, foreign language document reviews have dominated the U.S. contract attorney market.  Foreign language document reviews were 62% of our postings 2 years ago, and 74% of our postings over the last 12 months.   And a big reason is this enormous growth of IP litigation which crosses multiple countries and languages and is normally quite long in duration and almost always leads to extensive document reviews.   And you can’t do it in India.   Patent/IP prosecution, yes.  Multi-language litigations, no.

It is all about the convergence of technology markets — most clearly, the clash of mobile communications and personal computing in the smartphone — which has greatly added to the complexity as well as the potential for conflict as the prime battle for market share. There are potentially more than 250,000 patents involved in a smartphone, according to RPX (one of the new era’s middlemen who buy and license patents wholesale; for more about what they do click here).

Young companies that haven’t had a chance to amass their own stocks of patents, or those moving on to new technology turf, are the ones most at risk.  In this case, that may even include a company as mature as Apple, which ventured into new territory with the iPhone. It has fewer than 4,000 patents; a quarter of those were awarded since the start of last year, suggesting that it has been pushing hard to increase its IP holdings as it moves beyond its traditional computing base.  Even Google is light in the IP department which is why it was bidding $900 million to buy the Nortel patent pool (Nortel being in bankruptcy and its assets under bid, as many of us worked through that document review) as a defense. If Google did not buy the patents, they could well end up with a competitor, or in the hands of patent trolls who are going to go out and start trouble, trolls being buyers who acquire patents purely to start legal actions (for those who have not worked on a patent troll case some background).

There are now fights against Apple in six courts, over 6 countries, involving 50+ patents.  Add to that 40+ cases filed against Android — virtually all of them against companies that have built devices using the software.  There are at least 18 non-English languages involved.  

Side note:  to stay on top of all of this IP litigation (the whys and wherefores, etc.) we always turn to our colleague Florian Mueller and his blog Foss Patents and follow him on Twitter.    

Oh, global M&A is up, too

This is not to discount the enormous affect on non-English language document review by the surge by U.S. companies to do large strategic deal-making which has boosted global mergers and acquisitions, and just the simple effect of normal-course-of-business global transactions.  The U.S. now accounts for almost half of global M&A activity, up from about a third last year.  Nine of the 10 biggest deals this year have been struck in the US, almost all leading to large, non-English document reviews, deals involving companies from Brazil, China, Germany, India, Italy, Portugal, Turkey, and Russia — to name just a few.  

Catalyst Repository Systems (links at the top of the right column on this page) was one of the first to provide multi-language search and review for e-discovery and large-scale document review.  We spoke with John Tredennick, Catalyst founder and CEO, who explained:  “We have seen corporations and their law firms dealing with this spike in electronic discovery containing multiple languages.  I can attribute this to The World is Flat era whereby corporations work globally and communicate across many languages.  Today, when documents need to be reviewed, they usually contain multiple languages — the languages in which the companies do business whether it be intellectual property, mergers & acquisitions, or just every day business processes”.    

So just in the DC, LA and NYC document review markets you have multiple language document reviews involving companies such as Aisin, Ansa, Apple, AstraZeneca, Avon, Gitti Gidiyor, HTC, LG Electronics, Merck, Nissan, Pfizer, Research in Motion, Samsung, Sony, Takeda Pharmaceuticals, Toshiba –  to name but a few. 

For the agencies staffing these projects it has meant being quick and very flexible.  Jeremy Michalson of Diamond Personnel in NYC says of this spike in language projects:  “Many of these CJK projects [Chinese-Japanese-Korean] are a result of the deluge of Asia deals by companies in the U.S. and western Europe.  Facing sluggish economies many companies are looking “afar” for growth and what has helped are these cross-border deals.  You see it daily in just a cursory look at the Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times.  Almost all of these deals require regulatory examination — hence non-English document reviews in many cases.  We’ve been involved in many of these deals because we have a deep bench of multi-lingual attorneys that extends nationwide.  But what is different from the past — especially the IP reviews — is the numbers of foreign language reviewers per project has also become larger, thus creating the need to expand our searches nationally.”  

It is the same in D.C.  Lori DiCesare, President and CEO of Legal Placements, Inc. (LPI) told us:  “In 2010, and again in 2011, we have seen a remarkable surge in foreign language reviews.  This need had been fueled largely by FCPA and other government investigations.   And then the IP work spiked. But because LPI’s staffing team engage in “creative” recruiting to locate the appropriate legal professionals to meet this surge we have staffed a myriad of foreign language reviews across all subject matters.  It can be nerve racking because the non-English language projects seem to require more reviewers of late, but we know the market”. 

And there has been a change in the nature of the work, too 

Yes, a lot more work for contract attorneys fluent in languages other than English, and lots of work for e-discovery companies that handle non-English language document collection, processing and review.   Staffing agencies still handle the largest percentage of foreign language document review.  But e-discovery companies have aggressively moved into this market on their own or by teaming with staffing agencies.   It is why many of the CJK job posts you see on the Posse List are coming from these companies.

And there has been a demand for attorneys versed in arbitration/alternative dispute resolution (“ADR”) projects, especially IP.  This is because businesses mired in IP disputes are increasingly reluctant to expend ever-dwindling resources on protection and enforcement of their IP rights.   E-discovery in ADR is somewhat of a “new new” thing.    A conventional litigation is long and costly, whereas ADR is relatively inexpensive and  fast.  In the U.S. (according to IPWatchDog) the average cost of patent litigation is $2M, trademark litigation is $600K, and other types of IP litigation average between $500K and $800K. This, of course, does not include the price of an appeal, which may add another $2M to patent litigation.   The time involved is possibly more astonishing: the average IP litigation lasts 3 years. Add an additional year for an appeal.   ADR can take as little as 5 or 6 months.  

And there has been growing use of contract attorneys in preliminary IP due diligence:  (i) what IP rights the company owns or uses; (ii) how robust are these rights; and (iii) how unassailable are the company’s claims to these rights.  It is why you have seen so many Posse List job posts requiring IP lawyers at all levels and why we created a national Intellectual Property job listserv wherein we post IP work across the country.   As Jeremy Michalson of Diamond Personnel said (quoted above) the demand for these projects has created the need to expand the search beyond the immediate geographic area of the document review work for appropriate attorneys.  [To join any of our job lists just click here.]

Meanwhile, in Europe …

And this has also led to a surge of in-country litigation and compliance reviews in Europe.  Our sister company Project Counsel has completed 6 document reviews in the past year with 3 more now underway in Brussels, Lisbon, and London covering IP litigation, debt restructuring/due diligence, and M&A work … plus a myriad of specialized legal research and translation projects.    We’ll have a detailed post this Friday on the surge in document review work and other outsourced legal work across Europe and the principal players.

And next week: we start our series on the technology behind the processing and review of foreign language documents — encoding, format, script, language, text analytics, audio, etc. — with our video interviews of the people behind ZyLAB.  

8 April 2011 — We have received a mountain of emails asking about the competing NYSE Euronext deals so we thought we’d provide a summary.

Deutsche Boerse made the first offer.  Under that deal Deutsche Boerse shareholders are set to own 60 percent of the combined company with NYSE Euronext shareholders taking a 40 percent stake. 

In the second offer, NASDAQ OMX Group and ICE would make an outright acquisition of NYSE Euronext. 

NASDAQ OMX has Shearman & Sterling as legal counsel for this transaction and ICE has Sullivan & Cromwell. 

Deutsche Boerse has Linklaters, its longstanding outside counsel.

Wachtell Lipton has the lead attorney role for NYSE Euronext. 

Meanwhile, on the Deutsche Boerse side, Benelux firm Stibbe is advising on corporate issues and Cleary Gottlieb is advising on EU competition issues.

This Deutsche Boerse/NYSE Euronext transaction is more complex because it will require teams devoted to a number of specialties: corporate, antitrust, Hart-Scott-Rodino.   There are lawyers for regulatory, tax matters, and litigation plus separate lawyer teams of similar specialties in Germany and/or Brussels for EU issues.  It all grows exponentially from there. Each of these disciplines will be needed in the other jurisdictions where these businesses operate (France, Holland, Belgium and Portugal, to name a few). 

With cases of this magnitude antitrust counsel will first need to complete the compilation of documents responsive to Item 4(c) of the HSR filing. This is usually the first point of entry for subjective review teams.  For those Posse List members that have worked on large transactions of this sort, you know that clients often assemble 10+ member contract attorney teams to do the 4(c) review.

To refresh your memories, Item 4(c) asks for “… all studies, surveys, analyses and reports which were prepared by or for any officer(s) or director(s) … for the purpose of evaluating or analyzing the acquisition with respect to market shares, competition, competitors, markets, potential for sales growth or expansion into product or geographic markets….”   So 4(c) documents may include relatively brief and informal e-mail communications in addition to more formal reports analyzing the proposed merger. 

Consequently, given the necessity of searching a client’s electronic files for 4(c) documents, the 4(c) search often represents the antitrust lawyer’s first opportunity gain a preliminary understanding of the location, volume, nature, and accessibility of the client’s electronic data.

All the firms mentioned above who are handling the antitrust/HSR isssues have assembled “response teams” that will start with the 4(c) and then move on to manage the process of identifying and gathering electronic documents as necessary throughout the merger review process.  

As far as who is involved among the U.S. contract attorney staffing agencies, we have only heard rumors.   And a deal is obviously not close to being set.  But we know a fair amount of work has begun on the European side of the Deutsche Boerse offer via news through our European affiliate.  When we have definitive information, we’ll post it.   But given these days it seems there are too many agencies chasing too little work and there will be a boatload of prime law firms involved in the NYSE Euronext deal no matter who wins, we suspect all 85+ agencies that staff DC/NYC projects will have their snouts in the trough when a final deal moves forward.

For some background on these deals, Deutsche Boerse/NYSE Euronext produced a Powerpoint summary which you can access by clicking here.

For information on the NASDAQ/ICE offer, Nasdaq/ICE also did a Powerpoint  which you can access by clicking here.  

And if you really want get into the nuts & bolts of the Deutsche Börse/New York Stock Exchange agreement and understand the complexity of the matter you can read the 800+ page F-4 filed yesterday by clicking here.  

For some good summaries from the Wall Street Journal click here.

Reported by:  Gregory P. Bufithis, Esq. (with special thanks to Johann Jurgens who is a telecom analyst for a hedge fund and is an advisor to The Posse List on the telecom industry) 

21 March 2011 — Late yesterday AT&T and Deutsche Telekom announced an agreement for the sale of T-Mobile USA for $39 billion in cash and stocks.  It will yield the largest U.S. mobile phone customer base of 130 million users but all commentators agree: the deal will have to pass very tough regulatory review and other closing hurdles before becoming complete.  And the antitrust issues are enormous.  Even the press releases issues by each company said it’ll take them 12+ months to get through all the bureaucracy — if they get through.  In fact AT&T and T-Mobile issued a twenty-eight page PDF to convince regulators that their acquisition wouldn’t violate antitrust law. 

Morgan Stanley acted as lead financial advisor and issued a fairness opinion to the supervisory board of Deutsche Telekom. Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse acted as financial advisors for Deutsche Telekom. 

Deutsche Telekom was advised by Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz (the mergers & acquisitions practice group in New York), as well as Cleary Gottlieb and Wiley Rein (antitrust and regulatory law practice groups, Washington D.C.).

Greenhill & Co., J.P. Morgan and Evercore Partners acted as financial advisors and Sullivan & Cromwell LLP (New York), Arnold & Porter (D.C.), and Crowell & Moring (D.C.) provided legal advice to AT&T.

[ CONTRACT ATTORNEY STAFFING AGENCIES: START YOUR ENGINES!! ]

The proposed network merger will create a de facto GSM monopoly within the U.S.  But no worries.  AT&T envisions it as a rosy garden of “straightforward synergies” thanks to a set of “complementary network technologies, spectrum positions and operations.” 

In the event of the deal failing to receive regulatory approval, AT&T will be on the hook for $3 billion to T-Mobile – the breakup fee — along with transferring over some AWS spectrum it doesn’t need for its LTE rollout, and granting T-Mo a roaming agreement at a value agreeable to both parties.  If you do some Google-ing you will find a boatload of technical commentary on the deal. 

The cost to consumers?  It could be significant.  In its press release AT&T pointed to a recent report from the federal Government Accountability Office that said cellular subscription costs fell 50 percent from 1999 and 2009, a period in which the industry has consolidated.  But the reaction was swift.  The New York Times quoted Senator Herb Kohl who heads the subcommittee on antitrust, competition policy and consumers rights who said Sunday night “The explosion of cellphone usage — especially smartphones — makes competition in this market more important than ever as a check against rising costs.  Consumers have borne the brunt of the increasingly concentrated market for mobile phone service”.

AT&T customers, though, could benefit in one notable area: service. Both AT&T and T-Mobile operate on the same technology, known as GSM, so the combination should provide better coverage. That has been a sore point for AT&T, which has been ridiculed over dropped calls and slow data services, especially on Apple’s iPhone.

Our favorite Tweet so far:  “Oh for Jebus’ sake! I left AT&T for T-Mobile and now this??? What have I done to offend thee, Malevolent Overlords?”

The deal has long been anticipated in the telecom community and Sprint (who will fare the worst if such a transaction was completed) had its response locked and loaded, and released shortly after the AT&T and Deutsche Telekom press releases went out.  Quoting in part from the Sprint reaction:

The combination of AT&T and T-Mobile USA, if approved by the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Communications Commission (FCC), would alter dramatically the structure of the communications industry. AT&T and Verizon are already by far the largest wireless providers. A combined AT&T and T-Mobile would be almost three times the size of Sprint, the third largest wireless competitor. If approved, the merger would result in a wireless industry dominated overwhelmingly by two vertically-integrated companies that control almost 80% of the US wireless post-paid market, as well as the availability and price of key inputs such as backhaul and access needed by other wireless companies to compete. The DOJ and the FCC must decide if this transaction is in the best interest of consumers and the US economy overall, and determine if innovation and robust competition would be impacted adversely and by this dramatic change in the structure of the industry. 

We’ll try to report more as the story rolls out, especially if the deal gets to the point of launching subjective document reviews.

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.