ACC kicked off its Annual Meeting with a Welcome Reception and networking event in the Exhibit Hall last ight.  The Posse List team is here all week to cover the event.  Posse List members will recall the ACC Docket provided us copies of its May 2009 issue on document review (click here) and we starting covering the ACC last year when the General Counsel of The Gap suggested in-house law departments should use contract attorneys on a wider basis (click here). 

This week there are over 100 event sponsors and exhibitors from international law firms, litigation support providers and vendors/leaders in knowledge management.  Suprisingly, with the challenges many have been confronted with, along with the cuts in travel budgets, the Annual Meeting is expected to draw a crowd of more than 2,000 in-house counsel and over 2,500 total attendees.  ACC President Fred Krebs is extremely satisfied with this year’s turnout, and he noted during the Leadership Dinner last night  “We have more attendees here with us this year than last year….and ACC closed out the fiscal year on September 30 with over 25,000 worldwide.”

There is an emphasis this year on a theme we have discussed the last 2 years:  how corporations can protect themselves against the risks associated with high-profile scandals, security breaches, IP threats, increased litigation, audits and regulatory investigations.  As we have mentioned, corporations continue their trend to by-pass law firms and go directly to data management and e-discovery vendors to manage their compliance, ESI needs, etc. as they seek to “save a buck” and secure more ownership over the costs – especially the e-discovery process.

Note:  last night we chatted with several GCs about the consolidating of e-discovery vendors (failures, buyouts, etc.) and “who will survive?  Who do we pair up with?”

And all of this segues into the area of governance, risk and compliance (GRC).  This is not a “new new thing” and has been chronicled for well over the last year and half.  But this convergence of e-discovery and GRC technology and management is reshaping the industry and providing new opportunities and new directions for contract attorneys and other members of the Posse List. 

And the event is packed with vendors (and the swag is high-end and overflowing, an indication of the elite audience vendors are targeting).  One of the most interesting so far is the Practical Law Company (click here)  who gave us stacks of CDs that cover the “how to” of just about every area of law.  We will be discussing with them distribution options of this material for Posse List members.

It will be a great conference and we will be reporting on it all week.  For some pix from yesterday, here is a slide show provided us by Rob Robinson at Orange Legal Technologies (who provides us the “Top 10 plus” e-disc0very stories every week):  http://bit.ly/zRb3J

The summer and Labor Day holidays are over, and so we are off.

The ILTA conference (our coverage is here) held two weeks ago was an eye-opener on new trend lines, jobs for contract attorneys, etc. — especially the amount of Federal government work in the pipeline and the surge in work in Europe.  We’ll have more on ILTA later in this post.   First, some general comments on the contract attorney market.

1.   In many areas of the country the contract attorney/document review market seems to have broken open.  We hesitate to say “exploded” but as Gabe Acevedo of the über e-discovery site Gabe’s Guide said “in the old days it would be an uptick.  But in this lousy economy, in this market call it exploded.”

2.  We have posted 87 projects/positions in the last 2 weeks across all 70+ job lists, most being in the South and the West. 

3.   But DC is alive.  In the past 2+ weeks we have seen new projects or ramp ups from Covington and from Crowell (two law firms that do direct hire) plus projects from De Novo, Firm Advice, Hudson, Kelly Law, Lexolution, Palmer, Pat Taylor, Phase Legal, Special Counsel, and Update.  And Fulbright & Jaworski has a monster going: 120+ attorneys in two locations.

4.   NYC has remained fairily moribund.  The subprime and credit-crisis related work we all expected to hit DC and NYC seems to have avoided both markets for the most part although we count a combined 4 “financial crisis related” doc reviews in DC and NYC.  (We use feedback from Posse List members, Kevin LaCroix’s site http://www.dandodiary.com/ and a few other sites to track the progress of cases and their location, and determine which law firms are handling them).

5.   A good portion of the subprime and credit crisis-related doc review work seems to be centered in the Atlanta area, the Carolinas and the Midwest — lower cost regions.  As we have mentioned before, farmshoring has been gaining favor (click here).

6.  That doesn’t discount the projects that have scuppered off to India.  We have received feedback from our India-based Posse List members who work for LPOs (as we have previously reported scores of U.S. attorneys have been hired by LPOs as project managers).   They report 3-4 “credit crisis-related” projects.   We try to rectify those numbers with various media reports (many of dubious validity because they tend to be press releases by LPOs).  But admittedly we do not have full coverage in India.  Of the 85+ Posse List members based in India only about 10-15 report in on a regular basis and they cover only 5 LPOs and there are lots of LPOs out there.

     Note: the summer issue of ACC Docket, the magazine of the Association of Corporate Counsel, did a series on outsourcing and Indian LPOs — the good, the bad, the problems.  We hope to provide a detailed post this month with links to the issue as we did on the ACC Docket series on document review (click here).

7.    But on the bright side for DC and NYC (and London and Brussels) is that the increase in economic tensions/issues and the increase in high-profile scandals has lead to a rise in government data requests, compliance audits and investigations from both a state and federal level.  We have chronicled, among other investigations: the DOJ investigation of DTCC in the credit default swap probe; 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 and the DOJ review of the telecom industry.

8.   Foreign language projects still rule the roost with the FCPA and IP litigation cases dominating, and they are all over the market: DC, LA, NYC, Philly, the South, and West.  Europe postings have also increased.  We have posted 21 foreign language projects in the last 3 weeks.   Many are part of the rising number of FCPA follow-on civil lawsuits, projects we also track through Kevin LaCroix’s site (cited above).

9.    Lastly, in answer to your many questions, our job listings have expanded because our membership includes a great number of EDD vendors, in-house legal departments, and other entities who have posted projects and positions that benefit from a legal background.  In the last few weeks we have posted a number of project management and client services positions (not responsible for generating revenue) where the vendor has sought a contract attorney to manage a project (legal and non-legal) and handle the inevitable issues that arise, or, for instance, manage the contract administration function.  These have been with law firms, litigation support providers, corporate legal departments and corporate finance departments.

Some housekeeping:

a.  To subscribe to our job lists go here:  http://theposselist.com/mailman/listinfo   The master Posse List (called “Distribution” on that link) normally posts only articles of interest, trend reports, webinars/webcasts, etc.  If a project/position is national in scope or permits telecommuting then we will post on the “Distribution” list.

b.  starting this week, foreign language projects will post ONLY to the master foreign language listserv and the respective language listserv and will not post to the respective city/region listserv.  To subscribe to the Master Foreign Language listserv go here:  http://theposselist.com/mailman/listinfo/foreignlang_theposselist.com

We are still building out the individual language listservs.  So far we have:

Arabic

Chinese

Dutch

French

German

Greek

Hindi.Punjabi

Japanese

Portuguese

Spanish. 

We will be adding more and if you are on the Master Foreign Language list you will be notified what languages have been added.

Now, on to ILTA.   There have been some good blog posts (besides our own) which summarized the conference and we have them below.  But a few points from the conference that affect contract attorneys:

1.   Our  favorite “mantra” which we heard continually: greater use of contract attorneys by corporations, a trend we reported on earlier this year (click here) and recently confirmed by the Sapire Search Group (click here) and which Rees Morrison has covered numerous times on his blog (click here).  It has been reflected in our job postings.

     Note:  this is a topic area at the ACC annual meeting in October (http://am.acc.com) which we will be covering so we’ll have more to report.

2.   The march of EDD vendors into document review continues, the accelerating trend of corporations by-passing law firms and going directly to vendors.  Many EDD vendors are trying to move more into the “right side” of the EDRM as EMC has done (click here).  

3.   More important to the EDD vendors success is the continuing move of EDD directly into corporations and the (incessant) mantra of “early case assessment early case assessment early case assessment …” which is critical, of course, to the corporate client.  It’s the EDD vendors that can do this, not the regular staffing agencies, although many staffing agencies have paired up with EDD vendors to provide A-to-Z service (for example The Dine Group and Huron Consulting).  The reason is obvious:  the better you assess and plan, the lower the volume of data to review – and review is the biggest cost in the entire process.   Companies are desperate to save a buck or two, so they’ll be more likely to secure more ownership over the e-discovery process to enhance control and reduce costs.  Leveraging in-house technologies, internal legal teams will deploy early case assessment methodologies and data reduction strategies.

4.   And there is the Europe-Asia factor.  As litigation and arbitration cases are increasingly becoming global in nature, and data may come from a variety of countries, there is a mixture of legislative jurisdictions involved as well as a myriad of languages and cultures – including vast differences in the maturity of attitudes towards e-discovery.   With cross-border cases ever more frequent, the process of disclosure grows more complex. Documents created in any country and any language can be, and increasingly are, relevant to lawsuits, investigations or regulatory matters. 

     Note:  Much of the European work has been captured by EDD vendors and agencies with “boots on the ground” in Europe such as Hudson Legal London, Merrill Brink, Trilantic, and Outindex.  Much of this is attributable to the use of blocking statutes and the impact of European privacy laws which we have chronicled on our Europe page (click here). 

5.       Which is why … taking points 2, 3 and 4 above … you have the one-stop-shop-solution that corporations have been seeking and why companies like Catalyst Respository Systems,  eMag Solutions, EMC, eTERA Consulting,  FTI Consulting, Huron Consulting, and Merrill Brink have made such inroads.

6.   But “The Big Enchilada” discussed was Federal government contract work.  There is a flood of work from the FDIC, SEC, Treasury, etc. …  standard financial document review/processing contracts … hitting the FBO (see our background post by clicking here).

Many staffing agencies bid on and get these contracts (for example Pat Taylor and Associates in D.C. which is GSA qualified and has placed many contract attorneys on Federal projects).  But the EDD vendors are looking for the the large dollar projects such as, for example, Mega 3 contracts (competitively awarded contracts with the DOJ) that are for providing information technology and automated litigation support services to wide range of Federal government agencies.  These contracts go into the millions of dollars.  Scores of EDD vendors (and a growing number of regular staffing agencies) are now GSA Schedule qualified and bid on these contracts and many are setting up special teams for these projects which include contract attorneys.   We have posted a large number on our job lists.

7.   Another growth area:  the use of contract attorneys in the area of governance, risk and compliance (GRC) markets.  This is not a “new new thing” and has been chronicled for the last year and half (see for example here) but it was given heavy emphasis at ILTA.  There will be/has been a convergence of e-discovery and GRC technology and management and it is reshaping the industry.  Many contract attorneys are employed in these markets already.  Given the rate of technology shown at ILTA, and discussions we had with vendors, most e-discovery and GRC solutions will be cloud based in 10 years and corporations are moving toward solutions. 

In the U.S. and Europe one of the big combinations covering this area is eDiscovery Solutions Group, a major player in the GRC market, and Trilantic, a leading European-based e-discovery company.  See their recent press release here.  Another significant player is Fios Inc.

    Note:  we’ll discuss the GRC area is area in more detail in the coming weeks, most likely after the Association of Corporate Counsel annual meeting in Boston which we have been invited to attend.  The areas of governance, risk and compliance are major topics at this year’s event.

NOTE:   any and all projects or positions that we have received relating to points 1 through 7 immediately above have been posted and will continue to be posted to the appropriate Posse List job listserv.  In answer to your questions, there is no one geographic area where these jobs are.  We have posted them all over.  And there are scores of companies staffing in all of these areas.  We have only mentioned ones we interviewed at ILTA or in our D.C. office.

Now, for some good coverage/analysis of ILTA we recommend:

—  Chris Dale blog Edisclosure Information Project which you can access here and here.      

—  Ron Friedmann’s blog Prism Legal whch you can access here.

—  The ILTA/InsideLegal.com Technology Purchasing Survey which you can access here

—   The Above and Beyond KM blog which you can access here

Many of these topics deserve further discussion and analysis and we will attempt that in the coming weeks. 

And rather than bombard you daily with posts and articles about e-discovery and/or the contract attorney market, check our Twitter feed (top of the right hand column) or if you have a Twitter account follow us here:  www.twitter.com/PosseList

Sedona Conference on Cross-Border eDiscovery & Data Privacy
                 Barcelona, Spain June 2009

The Posse List has been fortunate to be able to cover the Sedona Conference on Cross-Border eDiscovery & Data Privacy which is being held this week in Barcelona, Spain.   As we have reported in the past, U.S.-style litigation and internal investigations and e-discovery are largely alien to non-U.S. organizations.   Data collection also is far more complicated in an international context than in a purely domestic one.   The purpose of this Conference is to have a meeting of the minds, a “meet and confer” if you will.

One of our Posse List (Europe) contacts is attending the meetings.   Representatives of the European Commission and data protection officials are in attendance and have spoken on many of the issues we outlined during our coverage of ILSL Conference (click here).   Extensive papers have been presented at the Conference including a long presentation on a key issue for those of us in e-discovery phase: pre-trial discovery for cross border civil litigation.

We cannot provide further details because of Conference restrictions, but we can provide three excellent resources:

1.  A great overview of the issue by Ken Rashbaum who is a Director of Fios Consulting at Fios, Inc. and a leading expert in the area (click here for the article).

2.  A very detailed article by Erica Davilla titled “International E-Discovery: Navigating the Maze” which covers all the points in great detail (click here).  

3.  The June issue of ACC Docket which has a great article titled “Protecting Privilege in a Global Environment“  (click here: the article in not publicly available but we will try to obtain permission from the ACC to reproduce a section of it).

4.   An article in the May 2009 issue of the  California Bar Journal by Michael Swarz titled “Beijing, Buenos Aires and Beyond: Litigating Global Electronic Discovery Considerations in a United States Courtroom” (click here).

Ken Rashbaum is a presenter at the Conference and we will be interviewing him in Barcelona.  We hope to post that interview next week.

Much of this affects Posse List members in the States who are working more and more on international discovery cases, as well as Posse List members in Europe and Asia where document reviews are on an upswing, all due to trends we discussed in the past: a continuing increase in FCPA cases, a continuing stream of patent litigation and cross-and other countries starting to enforce laws similar to the FCPA.   Much of this was confirmed earlier this week at the Association of Corporate Counsel Europe during its annual meeting in Europe (click here)  

And, as the SEC recently reminded, it has ”developed a sophisticated cooperative mechanism via bilateral and multilateral agreements with regulators around the world” for a global reach in securities enforcement (click here).