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 [...]

As we reported in May in Part 1 of our Trends series (click here),  law firms and legal process outsourcing to India still has a long way to go, and law firms still appear unconvinced.  And this is despite the Rio Tinto/CPA Legal tie-up (for insightful analysis on this subject from Rees Morrison click here and Jordon Furlong click [...]

We spent the last 3 weeks in Chicago, D.C., LA and NYC.   We met with Posse List members, law firms, e-discovery companies and staffing agencies, as well as a few in-house corporate legal departments where we have contacts, plus a few Federal government contacts. What follows are some brief observations on trends we see in [...]

The paradigm-shift Almost 7,000 lawyers have been laid off in the first two months of this year.  And all are not yet accounted for.  In today’s New York Times Adam Cohn dissects the paradigm-shifting changes taking place in the legal profession.  Noting the massive layoffs and venerable firm closures, Cohen suggested that these events are [...]

  The greatest client memo … ever The Am Law Daily encourages you to go to Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft’s client memo Web page right now to see if the single most bizarre memo we’ve ever seen is still up there — because we suspect it may not have a long life span. The memo [...]

  Even with contract attorneys providing law firms the opportunity to cut their bills/its 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 house document reviewers on a contract basis is higher than elsewhere in the U.S.   As we have reported [...]

Last night’s and this morning’s lead story in the legal media:  800 law firm jobs lost in one day.  And there will be more firings to come (click here for a sample).    For the contract attorney market there is a little gloating and perhaps a little schadenfreude.  Especially in the switch by AmLaw 200 advisers who first [...]