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 here).   In Part 1 we reported on several recent studies including a very detailed ValueNotes study which was published at the end of May.  Those studies revealed that less than 3% of law firms had any past experience of off-shoring legal services.    Although legal services outsourcing has garnered a lot of media attention, there still is a sizeable proportion of the legal community that has not considered outsourcing legal services to lower cost destinations.

The ValueNotes study has been making the rounds (it’s extremely detailed) and various blogs are offering detailed comments.  One of the best is provided by Ron Friedmann at his blog PrismLegal (click here) where he discuses how the ValueNotes findings match the market assessment of Integreon as an LPO provider, but with differences.   The following are some of Ron’s points with our comments (TPL) noted:

LPO Penetration is Low. “VN  found that offshoring still has fairly low penetration among law firms; less than 3% of firms in a random sample had tried offshoring. Prior surveys and Integreon experience suggest it is much higher. VN surveyed lawyers, not firms, which may account for the lower finding”.   TPL met with the IT departments (folks “in the know” on LPO connections at their firms) at 22 law firms in the last eight weeks and we agree with Ron and think it’s higher. 

Onshore Outsourcing is More Common.  “The total volume of outsourcing is higher if you take into account onshore outsourcing, which is more common than offshoring (especially in document review). In Integreon’s experience, only a small portion of the market is dogmatic about location; the vast majority let business requirements drive the location decision”.  As TPL has reported (click here) we have seen a dramatic increase in onshoring.

Cost Savings is the Main Driver. “VN found that cost savings is the main driver but Integreon also sees that many customers, both law firms and law departments, also focus on satisfying client pressure and improving turnaround time. I know that other outsourcing providers share this view”.  TPL has made this point countless times: corporate clients are driven by price.  But we diagree slightly with Ron about “turnaround time” because many firms told us that onshoring provided a faster turnaround time.

What Customers Seek in an LPO. “VN found that customers of offshore services seek a provider with deep management and domain expertise, good references, end-to-end services, the ability to scale, and onshore/ global delivery capability”.    TPL agrees but found that law firms and corporate clients had difficulty finding LPOs that hit all these points. 

Lack of Awareness is Biggest Reason Not to Offshore.  “The biggest reason law firms cite for not offshoring – 85% of firms – is lack of awareness of offshoring or no perceived need to do so. I was quite surprised since LPO has been around for 5 years and there’s been plenty of hype. Regular readers of this blog may recall I’ve been reporting on legal outsourcing since 2003!”   Actually, LPOs date back to mid-1995 and growth went vertical in 2000 when GE, Dupont, Dow and others opened captive LPOs in India.

Security Concerns.  “Firms cite security as a reason not to offshore. Firms can easily allay these concerns by assessing a provider’s facilities, security, and procedures. VN notes that firms with more extensive offshoring experience say that ‘client confidentiality and client conflict are not major concerns”.   TPL found that security/client conflict are still concerns at many law firms.

Quality Concerns.  “Some firms that tried offshoring were not satisfied with the quality. These instances were likely ad hoc projects that were not properly planned or executed. A reputable LPO should be able to demonstrate understanding of the components of quality and a customer due diligence should reveal whether it’s real”.  In our two trips to India, TPL found a surge in the employment of U.S. attorneys as project managers, trainers and supervisors.  We also found that more and more U.S. attorneys were being hired as LPO sales agents in the U.S.

Document Review Dominates Offshore Work.  “For firms that do offshore, VN found that document review is the most popular function to send offshore. This is consistent with LPO industry experience”.  That comports with what TPL found with the largest percentage being IP and/or othr civil litigation with financial/credit crisis litigation document review building. 

To see Ron’s full post with links to sources click here.    To follow Ron on Twitter click here.

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 contract attorney market and e-discovery market based on our meetings.   Some of these trends we have reported in our recent coverage of LegalTech (click here), ABATech (click here), ILSLC (click here) and some previous Trends reports (click here).

Some of general observations below merit greater discussion and we will expand on them as follows:

Part 2— going solo or freelance, and publishing a blog (posted: click here)

Part 3 — how to raise your profile, “brand” yourself, market yourself, and get published (posted: click here)

Part 4 — a look at selected e-discovery and litigation support vendors and opportunities for contract attorneys, including software certification and speciality (we’ll post this after ILTA09)

Part 5 — working in Europe (posted: click here)

Part 6 — the move toward and development of regulatory/compliance/risk management units in law firms and corporations and the opportunities for contract attorneys (this will be extensive and post in September)

Our general observations:

Foreign Language, FCPA and patents

1.  As we have reported, foreign language document reviews continue to dominate the U.S. contract attorney market especially in DC, LA and NYC.  This is due to the continuing increase in FCPA cases from firms such as Baker & McKenzie (they have 2 large cases now, with 2 more to come) and Kirkland & Ellis which have strong FCPA practices, as well as more FCPA work coming from Arnold & Porter which recently added a major FCPA partner.  This does not exclude other FCPA firms such as Sidley Austin, WilmerHale, Willkie Farr, etc. all of which have FCPA reviews going on. 

        Side note:  Kirkland & Ellis could have a lot more work coming across the board.   Two top partners at Skadden, Arps defected to Kirkland & Ellis.   One was David Fox, among the highest-paid lawyers at Skadden.  Skadden has had some hard times where revenue has fallen across nearly all practice areas.  Fox is a prominent mergers-and-acquisitions lawyer.   And Kirkland has a huge presence in the Persian Gulf which is generating FCPA and deal work.  Read: document reviews.

2.  As reported in today’s Wall Street Journal (click here),  the DOJ is increasing its prosecutions under the FCPA .   At least 120 companies are under investigation according to Mark Mendelsohn, a deputy chief in the DOJ division overseeing the prosecutions.   Several law firms we spoke with said most of the document reviews will be centered in DC and NYC and almost all will have English language components and not be totally foreign language.

       Side note:  the FCPA — born in 1977 amid investigations into alleged contributions to Richard Nixon’s re-election fund — now extends across five continents and penetrates entire industries, including energy and medical devices.  Among the companies currently under DOJ review are companies near and dear to the contract attorney market because of their long reviews: Sun Microsystems and Royal Dutch Shell.   Well, make that almost all of Big Oil.  There are a multitude of Big Oil reviews going on.

      The first big FCPA case that hit the radar for contract attorneys and document review (and reported in the above cited Wall Street Journal article) was in 2007 when the DOJ settled charges against Lucent Technologies for failing to properly record millions of dollars in travel to Disney World, Las Vegas and other sightseeing destinations for about 1,000 Chinese foreign officials who worked for state-controlled telecom companies. The company, which had characterized the trips as factory tours, admitted to the conduct and paid $2.5 million in fines.  But the Chinese kept the tee-shirts and Disney coffee mugs.

       And the biggest was the heavily reported Siemens case (click here)  which paid the largest foreign-bribery fine to date, and which said the cost of addressing its own corruption allegations was nearly as much as its total fine of €1.22 billion ($1.7 billion), including fines to the German government. The company is spending more money now on compliance programs and a government-mandated monitor.

3.  And this FCPA work has broadened out and led to the development of regulatory and compliance units in law firms, risk management units in corporations, led by early case assessment and total case assessment technology tools that have adopted regulatory and compliance capabilities that spot issues well before they become a problem.  The focus has moved away from law firms and to in-house law departments, affording a wide range of regulatory/compliance/risk management opportunities for contract attorneys.    And much of this is due to issues that were raised in a recent survey by the Association of Corporate Counsel, that many in-house counsel lack the tools/technology to manage key processes, or outside counsel handling those processes.   We’ll cover this in more depth in Part 2, and Part 5.

4.  But the stream of foreign language document reviews is also due to a stream of international patent litigation coming to such firms as Finnegan Henderson, Gibson Dunn and Baker Botts.  And all the law firms we spoke with say this will continue.

5.  There is also a spate of pharma litigations (straight pharma litigation and FCPA pharma) in DC and NYC and Posse List members tell us that Ajilon, ClutchLegal, Excelerate Discovery, HireCounsel, Hudson Legal, and Kelly Law Registry already have parts or are all in the ring on the bids.

6.  And one significant trend we have previously posted about but emphasized by several law firms this past week: although staffing agencies still do the larger percentage of foreign language document review, e-discovery companies have aggressively moved into this market.  IT/litigation support teams at law firms we have visited continue to tell me (as they did in December when I made my rounds) that it makes much more sense to have the e-discovery companies also handle the “back end” — the review itself — since the evolution of the technology makes it a natural progression.   Why use two vendors when you can use one?  This has impacted the contract attorney job market as more and more e-discovery companies and vendors build out staffing relationships or staffing units such as and Catalyst.

Bankruptcy

7.  As far as bankruptcy, the onslaught of pre-packaged bankruptcies (for background click here and click here) has shortened the bankruptcy review times (as all of you on the Chrysler document review will attest).  But we have hope that General Motors will file Chapter 11 by June 1st because analysts say it will require an army of lawyers (for story click here).

Meantime there is still a large demand for per diem bankruptcy attorneys and contract attorneys with more of a demand in the Midwest, South and West.  These are the Posse List job listservs that have received the most posts.

Europe and Asia

8.  Which brings us (albeit indirectly) to Europe and Asia.  We have seen a large uptick in document review work in Europe, and also Asia.  This is due to a number of factors such as the FCPA (yet again) and patent work and law firm/client use of “blocking statutes” and the emergence of very sophisticated e-discovery companies such as European-based Outindex and Trilantic, and  Asian-based companies such as  CCH Workflow Solutions, all of whom are developing the capabilities of document review, and European-based staffing agencies such as Project Counsel.  We’ll address contract work in Europe and Asia, and these companies, in Part 4.

      Side note: some of these trends we covered in our reporting from the International Litigation Support Leaders Conference two weeks ago (click here).

E-discovery and litigation support technology

9.  Dennis Kennedy recently posted a piece in the ABA’s Law Practice Today (click here) which is his annual prediction for trends in legal technology and his advice for coping or responding to those trends.   Dennis is an information technology lawyer and a highly regarded legal technology author.  He writes the technology column for the ABA Journal and is the co-author, with Tom Mighell, of The Lawyer’s Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies: Smart Ways to Work Together and he has a blog (click here) and a Twitter account (click here).   In the article Dennis sets out several trends including: 

       1.         Technology budgets get decimated

       2.         Making do with what you have or doing more with less

       3.         The mobile phone as platform

       4.         Looking to the cloud

       5.         Using tech to get the word out and the money in

       6.         Focus on client-focused technology

       7.         E-Discovery in still waters

His best recommendation for 2009 is one we have saying for months: read Richard Susskind’s new book The End of Lawyers? and familiarize yourself with the two biggest influences on the legal profession Susskind mentions:  commoditization and information technology and the way they will disrupt and change the profession, faster than we expect.  For our posts on Susskind click here and click here.

We want to comment on Dennis’ points #5 and #7.

       #5 is something we have been blogging about on The Posse Ranch (www.theposseranch.com).  Had you even heard of Twitter a year ago? Now you can’t turn around without seeing something about using Twitter, Facebook, social media tools, blogs, podcasts and online video for marketing. You can put video up on Youtube, publish PowerPoint slides on Slideshare, create your profile and groups on LinkedIn, have a blog, create a podcast and do many, many more things to get your message out and create a brand. The financial cost of most of these tools is next to nothing. Think about how you and your potential clients get their information today. Create a channel to reach them that way.   On our Posse Ranch site you can find all types of help.  We will address this in full in Part 3 on Thursday.

        As regards his overall comment in point #7, we could not agree more:  no area of legal technology receives more attention than e-discovery.   We have written about the 3 trends he highlights:  the growing emphasis on cooperation and collaboration;  technologies and techniques to produce usable and workable datasets out of enormous amounts of data; an increasing amount of focus on high costs of EDD, with the parallel trend of treating some EDD procedures as commodities, with commodity types of pricing and off-shoring.

But we especially note his “trend you will want to take notice of is one that started a few years ago and has continued to grow”.  It’s the movement of the lawyers who know the most and who are the best at EDD out of law firms and into the employ of EDD service providers.  He calls this a “tectonic shift” in that the probable long-term result will be EDD service providers largely taking this work away from law firms and “EDD, perhaps, [will] no longer even [be] considered part of the ordinary practice of law, leaving litigation lawyers to redefine what they actually do as clients route around them to the EDD service providers who have all of the talent”.

And it affects the contract attorney world.  Because one thing we heard over and over these last few weeks yields another, more direct trend affecting contract attorneys:  law firms and corporations have begun asking e-discovery companies and vertically integrated staffing agencies whether they can provide “enterprise wide” e-discovery solutions: managing and/or staffing projects for a law firm or corporation in any of its offices across the U.S. and/or across the globe.  Can they be “the one” vendor?  And part of this is due to a sub-trend: doing the doc reviews “local” in Europe and Asia because of blocking statute rules and data privacy.

But more importantly, going to e-discovery companies — the folks processing the data from the start — and asking “…and can you staff the review?”  For example, word on the street is that ePIC (an EDD) has picked up data processing contracts with a major mortgage lending company and telecommunications company. ePIC is close to landing a similar contract with a major energy company. All three contracts will involve document review work where ePIC would hire project managers and contract attorneys directly.  And that’s just one example.

10.  And then there is computer forensics, an area of growth for contract attorneys with a tech bend.  Data recovery, computer forensics and e-discovery all deal with data, and specifically digital data. It’s all about electrons in the form of zeroes and ones. And it’s all about taking information that may be hard to find and presenting it in a readable fashion.   Yes, the skill sets require different tools, different specializations, and different ways of looking at things.   But there is an overlap.

Chris Jurkiewicz of Venio Systems recently conducted a poll titled “Do you see the E-discovery and Computer Forensic markets merging?” and of the 122 e-discovery respondents from around the world who responded, 72.1% said yes and 27.9% said no.

We “found” Venio Systems at LegalTech and it has electronic discovery software that allows forensic units, attorneys and litigation support teams to analyze data, provide an early case assessment, total case assessment and a first pass review of any size data set.  We have not interviewed them yet but we hope to include them in Part 5 of this report when we look at the tech companies and opportunities.

11.  To finish off this technology section, last week Ralph Losey did a post on his blog about the ethical problems of attorneys who don’t know enough about e-discovery or, as Ralph put it  “abdicate the traditional role of lawyer as master of discovery” .  The result of this abdication has been a rise in e-discovery expenses, an increase in lengthy and unnecessary motions practice and a subsequent upturn in sanctions against law firms.  

He was interviewed (click here) by Browning Marean and Tom O’Conner, two leading lights in e-discovery world and discussed the failings of law schools and bar associations to provide certification or competency training in this field. 

We include it here because of all the law schools and bar associations who have susbcribed to The Posse List and also follow us on Twitter, and the new contract attorney members of The Posse List who had “some” e-discovery course work in law school and/or completed a certification course.

India … and China !!

12.  Law firms and legal process outsourcing to India still have a long way to go, and law firms still appear unconvinced.  Several recent studies and a recent survey US and UK based law firms (here, here and here)  reveal that less than 3% of law firms had any past experience of off-shoring legal services.    Although legal services outsourcing has garnered a lot of media attention, there still is a sizeable proportion of the legal community that has not considered outsourcing legal services to lower cost destinations.

      Side note:  offshoring of legal services to India began way back in 1995 when law firm Bickel & Brewer opened a captive facility in India.  Although Dow Chemical, Dupont, GE and other corporations set-up LPO operations in 2000 and 2001, the legal services outsourcing industry started to attract significant attention only around 2005.

In a matter of just a few years, the industry has grown to reach $225 million in revenues in 2008. However, this is only a very small portion (<4%) of the addressable market. According to the recent survey by ValueNotes there is a low perceived benefit of outsourcing legal services amongst law firms.   Most of the law firms are relatively new in terms of their off-shoring initiatives and have not integrated off-shoring in their overall strategy.  A large number of law firms, irrespective of their size, are apprehensive about sending their legal work to another country.  While this does result from lawyers not being convinced about the benefits of off-shoring, they also indicate concerns such as data security, client confidentiality and quality of work delivered.

Cost reduction (surprise!!) was rated as the primary driver for off-shoring legal services. Other significant drivers include increasing workload, time differences and competitors’ decisions to offshore.  But while there seems to be some awareness about the benefits of offshoring, especially amongst those who offshore. for the majority the drivers do not seem to be strong enough.  Any benefits do not appear to be substantial to help over-ride their concerns.

Data security and quality of work delivered emerged as the key concerns for law firms. Given the confidential nature of legal documents, it is understandable that law firms have apprehensions on the security aspect.

No, off-shoring is not going away and the blended enterprise approach (first review in India, second review in the U.S. or UK)  and the overall cost reduction still is a driver for some. 

13.  China: a rising power in global outsourcing?  A new paper from KPMG (click here) takes a look at China’s rising importance in global outsourcing.   Chinese vendors have progressed to specialize in niche areas such as: legal process outsourcing, animation and gaming, e-learning, offshore engineering and pharmaceutical R&D.

While many companies are showing greater appetite for outsourcing diversification, they still want the reassurance of dealing with companies with global perspective and experience, the paper says. This is where the Chinese government’s so-called “1000-100-10″ plan comes into play:  Launched in 2006 with funding in excess of US$1bn, the plan aimed to establish 10 Chinese cities as global outsourcing bases (subsequently increased to 20 cities in January 2009), to attract 100 international corporates to outsource to these locations and to develop 1000 Chinese outsourcing vendors to service this new client base.

It was an ambitious plan (ah, China) but the results can be seen with Dalian, Shanghai and Beijing already ranked in the top 10 most attractive cities for outsourcing. 

While the potential benefits of China as an outsourcing center are many — technical skills, language skills, depth of talent and pricing to name but a few — it is the increasing professionalism of the fledgling, 15 year old industry which is impressing many, the paper concludes.  

And China has employed a bit of a “twist” especially in the legal process outsourcing area:  many vendors offer thorough, months-long training programs in technical skills and customer service and substantive areas by stationing Chinese workers overseas for extended periods at customer or corporate locations to become more familiar with the client’s business operations.    

Gregory P. Bufithis, Esq.   Founder and Chairman, The Posse List

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 a harbinger of reduction in associate compensation, alteration of billing structure, flat lining of law school tuition, and changes in law school curriculum  (for full article click here)

These jobs aren’t coming back.  This dynamic has proved true in past recessions as well, with fading industries pushed to the brink during downturns before others emerged to create jobs when economic growth inevitably resumed. Why should it be any different for the law industry?  But with job losses so enormous over such a short period of time, the latest crisis challenges the traditional American response to hard times.  And the next decade was always going to be difficult.  As retirement beckons for the middle-aged “bulge” in many national populations, governments have been facing an expensive demographic transformation.  The economic crisis makes the outlook only worse.

This paradigm-shift has been expertly examined by Richard Susskind in his book The End of Lawyers?: Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services who we profiled in an earlier post when we examined the changing legal landscape (click here).   He was the keynote speaker today at the ABA TechShow in Chicago and we’ll have a report later in the day on his speech ( click here).

And nobody has chronicled and analyzed this upheaval in the legal industry better than Jordan Furlong on his blog Law 21  (click here)  and David Lat on his blog Above the Law (click here).  

So where does that leave the contract attorney industry?

The contract attorney market – in brief

We’ll get into specifics shortly but first some brief observations:

1.  The market has been dead for the last several months.  But in the last few weeks there has been an uptick in contract attorney work (which we are defining as large-scale document reviews and projects, the bread & butter of the contract attorney industry) in every U.S. market except the NYC metro area.  Our measure?  An increase in Posse List job postings and an increase in our representative Posse List members whom we poll telling us “I am getting calls from agencies again.”      

2.  In several earlier posts (here and here) we noted how the drive to cut costs has led corporations and law firms to seek other ways to cover their e-discovery work without sending it overseas.  A law firm or client’s desire to simply seek lower cost alternatives has led to a growing development of “farmshoring” or “onshoring” by staffing projects in preferred U.S. locales. 

[Note:  we caught a lot of flack for our use of the term "farmshore" sourcing.  It has long been used by the IT industry which has been engaged in offshoring/outsourcing/farmshoring for over 20 years.   For just one site of many with the reference click here.  It is also called "rural sourcing".  It is the placement of IT jobs/work in low-cost regions of the service recipient's country.    The legal outsourcing industry is very, very late to the game of outsourcing in general. It has simply picked up most of the structure and vernacular long used by the IT and manufacturing outsourcing industries.  Legal outsourcing dates to about 1995 (the first significant project in India) but the trend did not really pick up until 2000.  We intend to post our "history of legal outsourcing" later this spring to give you a better idea of how the pieces came together and contract attorney jobs were lost.] 

3.  We normally see a surge in Posse List membership in February/March and July/August which coincides with the bar exams as many attorneys seek temporary work pending their bar results.  The last two months have seen a greater surge and much of this is due, we think, to the lay-offs at BigLaw.  Many new members have described themselves as “recently laid-off” or have attached resumes, and many have also mentioned a change in their attitude about the “stigma” associated with contract work.  Gabes Guide covered “the stigma issue” in a series of recent articles (click here). 

4.   There are English language projects out there but so far the majority continue to be foreign language because of the steady flow of IP litigations, FCPA cases and cross-border civil litigations.  Over the last few months we have posted many more projects on our Mid-West, Far West and Southwest listervs (click here for all of our listservs) than we have on the DC Metro and NYC Metro listservs — the traditional contract attorney work centers.  But D.C. is picking up for reasons we describe below.

5.  What is happening in DC and NYC is probably emblematic of what is happening across the entire U.S. contract attorney market. Based on conversations we have had with law firms, staffing agencies and e-discovery companies: 

    a.  Most agencies have enough people on their internal rosters so they do not need to go to The Posse List, Monster.com, etc. They turn to their favorites (their best reviewers, steady billers, the “non drama queens”, etc.) and when they need extras they get a bit pickier.  Law firms tell us they see many of the same names on project after project although we are not sure how that impacts conflicts.

    b.  Law firms seem to be setting more precise qualifications (told to us by both law firms and agencies) and often ask for experience in a particular kind of case or in several subject areas.  They often set a floor:  minimum of 3 years of doc review experience, or even 5 years in some cases. 

    c.   Agencies’ profit margins are being slashed and we keep hearing about bids that are lost because someone else bid a price well below “market levels” — and “market level” is a pretty loose term given the spread of hourly rates (see below).  Law firms are allowing counter-offers and late bidding in many cases.

     d.  The technology is getting better (we covered that here)  and project teams are getting smaller in many cases.  A few law firms told us they are dealing with smaller litigation budgets,  the “lopping off” of potential litigation issues that law firms and clients were initially willing to examine, and assumptions that early case assessment will find most of what they need to focus on.   [NOTE: Early case assessment, the new technology,  etc. will be covered in later postings via our link-ups with Orange Technologies, ONSITE3, Fios, Merrill Brinker and other technology vendors].

    e.  Gridlock in law firm and corporate decision making.  For instance, based on chats with several DC agencies/e-discovery companies, law firms have issued at least 7 RFPs (request for proposal) out to the DC market and most are “on hold” and we suspect a multitude of agencies and e-discovery companies are bidding on each.

6.  The firms staying busy during this downturn are focused on the “still hot” practice areas such as litigation, intellectual property and bankruptcy.  And we have had significant feedback that mid-sized firms are taking advantage of clients’ desire for lower rates and alternative billing by opening offices in other cities to meet the ever-growing demand.

7.   While the e-discovery hiring outlook remains strong for 2009 (click here) the e-discovery landscape is changing.  It consists of pure-play e-discovery software vendors (like Kazeon, Autonomy, Guidance etc.),  legal service providers (staffing agencies and companies like FTI and ONSITE3),  hosting service providers and law firms.  All of these entities sell their product and services to corporations.   Increasingly, we have seen a trend wherein corporations are starting to adopt e-discovery in-house for reasons of cost, risk management and information control.  The current economic climate is aggravating the situation.  And they are starting to eat each other.  Atttenex was bought by FTI for a relatively small amount for its Patterns product offering, Stratify was absorbed by Iron Mountain, MetaLINCS by Seagate, Discovery Mining by Interwoven, Applied Discovery by LexisNexis and the list continues to grow.

So let’s look at a few selected contract attorney markets based on feedback from a large number of Posse List members in each of those markets.    

The D.C. Market and Federal Government Work

As we have all seen in the media, the various administration stimulus packages will increase government hiring, full-time and part-time.    So first, let’s take a quick look at the full-time job market.

The federal government will need to hire an additional 200,000 workers over the next three years as a result of President Obama’s federal stimulus plan and additional spending included in his budget plan.  That may sound like a lot of jobs, but it’s just slightly less than half of the 384,000 additional employees Uncle Sam already needed to pick up between 2009 and 2012 just to replace existing federal employees expected to leave their jobs.  That 384,000 is a projection for retirements, voluntary separations, reductions in force and a few folks who will die on the job.  [We get our information from the Partnership for Public Service, a Washington, DC, advocacy group working to advance public-sector careers, which tracks all this stuff].

With a total of nearly 600,000 openings over the next three years (and an estimated 12,000 legal jobs), what options could there be for you?

About 85 percent of federal jobs are located outside Washington, DC. But, since many stimulus-related jobs involve command, control, tracking or oversight, a sizable proportion — up to 22 percent – will be located in the District of Columbia itself.

And who’s hiring?

The federal government currently employs 1.9 million civilians — about the same number it did during the Kennedy administration. Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton downsized the federal bureaucracy, while Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush increased it.

Some of this administration’s 200,000 extra workers will be added thanks to changing priorities. For example, President Obama’s 2010 budget increases funding for the Social Security Administration (SSA), so it can hire additional employees to work through a backlog of cases. The agency will hire more than 5,000 people by September 2009.  These include front-line positions in the local field offices and Teleservice Centers as well as legal support positions in our hearing offices.

Another budget priority — better care for veterans — resulted in a $25 billion increase for the Department of Veterans Affairs.  A good part of that will go into hiring more medical and health professionals in the VA.

Jacque Simon, public policy director for the American Federation of Government Employees, says agencies expected to add staff due directly to the stimulus include the Environmental Protection Agency; the Department of Defense; the Food and Drug Administration; the Border Patrol; the Small Business Administration; the departments of Labor, Education, Agriculture and Housing and Urban Development; and the National Science Foundation.

Many agencies are still toting up the numbers. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates it will take tens of thousands of contractors and employees to handle clean up, assessments, design and monitoring of the projects in the areas it will target with stimulus money. These areas include Superfund sites, brownfields, leaking underground storage tanks, clean water, drinking water and reducing diesel emissions.

Bring on the Watchdogs  

With so much stimulus money flowing out of Washington, virtually every agency will have to hire additional auditors, attorneys and investigators to handle the fraud that will inevitably follow. In government, those positions are part of the Inspector General’s office within each agency or department.

The Inspectors General are going to be beefing up staff.   The Department of Health & Human Services (www.hhs.gov) for example, has $27 million for increased oversight. In addition, Congress slotted $50 million to create the Recovery Act Transparency and Accountability Board, a group of Inspectors General that will watch over stimulus spending.

Given the tighter regulatory scrutiny of the financial markets, we already heard there will be job openings at Treasury, FDIC, SEC.    But besides Traesury, the FDIC and the SEC, the other players will be the Office of the Comptroller (part of Treasury), the NY State Insurance Department, the Office of Thrift Supervision, the CFTC and OFHEO.    We will have a lot more on this in a later posting (we have a lot to cover) but right now do yourself a favor and get your cover letter/resume into:  http://www.ustreas.gov/initiatives/eesa/jobs.shtml

For while Treasury is settling nicely into its new digs (click here)  we know that at least 75 Posse List members have picked up jobs in the TARP program although they are spread out over town.

The Government Accountability Office started hiring 100+ people familiar with government auditing.  We don’t have a web link for your yet but we’ll find one.  These jobs will be tough:  prior federal government auditing experience is great, but it’s not the only way to qualify for these positions.  If they’ve done any kind of state or government auditing, or you’ve audited public entities or nonprofits, that would be qualifying experience.

Focus on the Mission

As we have discussed in previous posts, if a federal job is your best career move, don’t look for a stimulus job — look for a government job.  Look at who’s got a job to fill and which agencies have a mission that you’re interested in.  Gather career information by visiting the official federal government hiring site as well as the individual agency Web sites.  And keep plugging.  Posse List members have experienced wait times between 9 months and 2 years.  But they keep hammering, hammering, hammering. 

And yes, it will be tough.  Example:  in January 2009, after the Federal Bureau of Investigation said it wanted to hire 2,100 professional staffers, it received 230,000 applications.

Ok, let’s discuss doc reviews, 8(a) jobs, etc.

 While the direct-hire Federal jobs described above are greasing the market, the D.C. contract attorney market is also seeing an uptick due to:

1.  The slow manifestation of financial melt-down/credit crisis litigation

2. More agencies/e-discovery/Federal contractors getting work/bidding on work that is direct-to-the-government

3.  Regular work trickling into the market

The FannieMae and FreddieMac investigations launched last fall (click here) are now in the data collection stage and e-discovery companies (not staffing agencies) have been selected for the processing, and the actual document review.  We can’t tell you which companies … yet … because we signed NDAs with the agreement that The Posse List will post the first announcement when they staff.  Each of these investigations have 125+ custodians and a few TBs of data so we expect the processing to go for awhile.

Plus, the anticipated New Century/KPMG law suit filed yesterday.  KPMG is being sued for $1bn by the liquidators of New Century, the collapsed subprime lender, and is the first big case against an auditor arising from the current financial crisis.  Almost all of the KPMG doc reviews have been done in D.C. and we assume the pattern will prevail.  Well, assuming KPMG does intend to “rigorously defend” the suit as its press release said.

Plus, the start of some financial melt-down/credit crisis litigation (slowly) hitting the D.C. market (and other markets) as we have reported in the past, which we have been following courtesy of our “tracker” colleague Kevin Lacroix  (click here).   

And every survey/grid we have read shows the surge in securities litigation.   As examples click here, here, and here.

But it also important to note that getting to doc review can be a slow grind (click here).

So what has happened in D.C. is that after a significant drop-off, contract work has increased and remained steady for a number of agencies such as American Legal Search, Hudson Legal, JurisStaff, Kelly Law Registry, Law Resources, Legal Placements, and Lexolution.  But these agencies have not had the need to post regularly on The Posse List,  Monster.com, Craigs List, etc. because they can draw on their internal lists of contract attorneys. However they continue to look for qualified candidates.

In addition several staffing agencies are getting Federal staffing contracts because they are specially qualified by being 8(a) certified companies (these are firms eligible to get “first preference” on Federal contract because they are owned and operated by socially and economically disadvantaged individuals), or they are certified woman-owned, GSA approved staffing firms (such as Pat Taylor & Associates).    D.C. agency contact information can be found on our home page under Staffing Agencies.

 And how is the D.C. market doing right now?   The rate band has been $30-35 per hour, with many of the most recent projects (last 45 days) at $32 or $33.   D.C. Posse List members report a total of 21 projects, 15 being English language review and 8 being all or part foreign language review.  Based on this information, we guesstimate about 1,200 D.C. Posse List members are working.

Now, onto other markets:

ARIZONA

 Riley Carlock & Applewhite may be the largest user of contract attorneys in Arizona although there are many others.  In 2006-7, the hourly rate in Arizona (mostly Phoenix) was $40 but that has dropped to a range of $30-34.  Most projects are long term litigations although there are several short-term projects.

 Based on Posse List members, there are 6 projects spread out in Flagstaff, Phoenix and Scottsdale.   None are foreign language. 

CHICAGO

Chicago has seen an uptick in work.   Chicago projects seem to be running a band of $28-35 per hour.   Of the 14 projects reported, 8 were capped at 40 hours per week.  But all 14 of the projects have run 4+ months or longer, with 4 at 1+ years.

Chicago also seems to have more flat-rate (no overtime) projects than anywhere else in the country although we know NYC also has a high percentage.   Only 3 projects reported by Posse List members had paid overtime although they allowed 50 hour weeks.

Also, Posse List members (and Chicago agencies) tell us NYC agencies are moving into Chicago and low-balling RFPs to get business.  In one case a project moved from $32, to $30 to $28.

DALLAS/HOUSTON

We’ve paired these markets although Dallas is not as busy as Houston.  But most of the projects share similar traits.  Of the 14 projects in Dallas/Houston the work:

• a. is IP related or energy related, with a number of bankruptcy doc reviews
• b. has been long-term (8 of the projects reported have gone 1 year+)
• c. has paid $35 an hour
• d. has overtime

Dallas, on the whole, has maintained a $35 hourly rate but most of the projects are capped at 40 hours unlike Houston.  But many are long-term (4 now going over 1-1/2 years).

Houston has a larger share of foreign language projects and one project (part requires German fluency required) has a 50 hour min/75 hour max with most contractors doing 60 hours.   The German piece of the project started in June 2008 and is expected to run through June 2009.

Legal People has a long-running document review in Houston (started in September 2008) with an hourly rate of $35, unlimited hours.  But everything over 40 hours is still paid at straight time.   The minimum hourly requirement is 50 per week and the project is expected to last until at least June 2009.

We have also seen many more projects allowing “independent contractor” status (1099) in Texas than elsewhere.   We have several Posse List members on projects as independent contractors at $40/hour, some at 40 hours per week and a few at unlimited hours. 

One element keeping contract attorneys employed in Texas (and the other energy states of Colorado and Oklahoma) is that many U.S. energy producers are being forced into bankruptcy or asset sales by banks, which are using annual reviews of company debt to cut permittable levels below existing borrowings. 

As one law firm explained, producers have few choices in terms of raising new finance when confronted with repaying debt immediately, with many unwilling to tap equity markets, given the dilutive effect of issuing stock at today’s low prices and the inability of finding buyers for new equity.   In addition, the severe drop in commodity prices has slashed the value of their assets.

“This is forcing companies to sell assets they don’t want to sell or to sell whole companies.  Or has led to complex Chapter 11 bankruptcy transactions.  These lead to doc reviews.”

 NEW MEXICO

 A large number of Posse List members recently wound up two long-term (14 months plus) litigations.  These were small: 8-10 contractors each.

The terms were similar:  40 hours per week (overtime not permitted) and the pay was $32/hour for contractors at the beginning of the project and reduced to $28/hour for people hired at the end of the project. 

 Posse List members reported 6 other projects, all short-term (ranging 2 weeks to 2 monhs) at $32 per hour, no overtime.

 These were the only projects reported by Posse List members.  None are foreign language.

OHIO

There has been a smorgasbord of projects throughout Ohio (mostly in Cleveland) due to the presence of Jones Day and due to the document review centers run by Hudson Legal, Kelly Law Registry, Lumen Legal, etc.

Rates have been all over the ballpark but Posse List members report:

1.  Approximately 12 projects

2.  $21/25 hour

3. 40 hour maximum

PHILADELPHIA

The best blog we have found that covers Philadelphia is Black Sheep of Philly Contract Attorneys and they recently posted a complete run down of Philadelphia projects which you can access by clicking here.   It is an extremely detailed list and rather than repeat it here just click above.

Legal process off-shoring (the Indian LPO market)

We will address the LPO market in a subsequent  posting, but just a few points.

 About 43 members of the US Congress have written to financial services firm JP Morgan Chase, asking it to explain its plans to increase outsourcing to India.  The media has reported that JP Morgan plans to increase outsourcing to India by 25%. The financial services firm has been the recipient of $25-billion from the U.S. government’s Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP).  The outsourcing jobs are both legal and financial.   In a letter addressed to JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, the Congress members asked: “How should these American workers, many of them your consumers, be expected to have hope for a better future when the very companies they contributed to through TARP outsource the jobs they desperately need?”    A JP Morgan Chase spokesperson in India refused to comment on the matter.

We spoke to several Posse List members in India who are project managers (all U.S. attorneys) and they said the bulk of what they have is FCPA review and securities litigation review (credit crisis related).  Three of them (who have been there for 1+ years) say “the stuff coming this way is increasingly complex”.  

We also spoke to Posse List members who are EU barred and they were working on IP litigation and IP prosecutions.

And issues discussed by all our Indian contacts:

1.  The number of U.S. attorneys going to India for work is increasing. 

2.  There has been a move by Indian LPOs to offer CLE programs (click here).

3.  The legal process outsourcing industry will consolidate (click here).

 Thinking “outside the box” 

And in answer to a number of questions about several of our “nontraditional postings”.   We will continue to post non-attorney positions since many Posse List members are trying to think “outside the box” and find work outside of normal contract attorney work but work that fits their experience profile.   For instance, this is why we post a fair amount of contract manager/administrator/negotiator positions on all the lists, many of which stipulate ”attorney preferred” although the position is not a lawyer job per se.    We are just trying to assist in a difficult market.

THIS WEEKEND,  PART 2:  more on Federal government work, some info on freelance work and going solo, and the (growing) work in Europe.

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 (linked below) is attributed to Steven Lofchie, co-chair of the firm’s financial services department, and it is entitled: “The Manny Ramirez Lightbulb: Also (2 Ideas in 1 Memo) Putting Pay in Perspective.” It begins as a rant about former Red Sox outfielder (now with the Dodgers) Manny Ramirez: “I am enraged! and outraged! plus morally reprehensibled (did I say I am outraged!) that Manny Ramirez has inked another huge contract.”

For full article click here.    Note:  if no longer available via the link above, a copy can be found by clicking here.

Electronic discovery shouldn’t be a big deal, but somehow everyone seems to get it catastrophically wrong

A post from January but worth repeating given the recent e-discovery sanction cases :  Ralph Losey discusses a D.C. Appeals Court decision which affirmed an order requiring a non-party to spend $6 Million (9% of its total annual budget) to comply with an e-discovery subpoena.

For full article click here.

The job market for lawyers in India stinks (sob, sob)

It’s not just U.S. and U.K. law students facing a tougher job market. According to a report from Livemint, a Wall Street Journal affiliate, India’s top law firms are also drastically scaling back their on-campus recruiting.

Over the past five years, Amarchand Mangaldas Suresh A. Shroff & Co, India’s leading corporate law firm, hired some 200 graduates from the West Bengal National University of Juridical Science, lecturer and placement adviser Anirban Chakraborty told Livemint. But this year, Amarchand has only hired three. Luthra & Luthra, another major firm that used to heavily recruit at the school has recruited no students this year. So far, only 36 of 64 students applying for jobs have found one.

For full article click here.

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 in the past, besides the state-of-the-art technology driving costs down, the drive to cut costs has led corporations and law firms to seek other ways to cover their e-discovery work — without sending it overseas (click here and click here). 

These outsourcing discussions highlight a law firm or client’s desire to simply seek lower cost alternatives, and that has led to a growing development of “farmshoring” or “onshoring” by staffing projects in preferred locales that the industry calls the lower cost “on shore” centers of, for example,  Atlanta, Charlotte, Columbus, Houston, Indiana and Tennessee, as well as working with law firms in smaller metropolitan areas where billable rates are lower but quality is just as high, or going with lower cost niche firms throughout the country. 

As Lumen Legal says in its recent white paper: “As such, the industry is re-thinking its cost-saving strategy even further, expanding it to ask not only who is performing document review, but where.  Companies are starting to accept that the location of the contract lawyers is irrelevant.”

And so we’ve seen this greater movement to “outsourcing” document reviews but to these “on shore” centers — to U.S.-licensed lawyers in less-populated, less expensive areas of the country.  It’s the alternative to offshoring that many clients and attorneys find unattractive.  Ohio, North Carolina, Tennessee and Texas, for instance, have a wealth of law schools, a supply of legal skills and legal services capacity, and housing document reviews is not as expensive as other regions.

And that’s why we’ve recently seen a 50+ lawyer document review in San Antonio, a 45+ attorney document review in Tennessee and a soon-to-launch 50-75 attorney document review in Ohio.

And that’s why our staffing agency list keeps growing .  You can find a complete list of staffing agencies (with more to come) under “Staffing Agencies” on our home page.

Yes, there is work — and it’s not all foreign language and definitely not like the work flow in days of yore — but it definitely is not all in India.   We are certainly NOT discounting the power of offshore centers but there is also an undercurrent in the U.S., away from the metro centers.

So we are expanding the job lists to serve new Posse List members and new agencies.  You can find a complete listings of all our job lists by clicking here.   And there will be more lists to come as we add several cities.

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 spoke about “the stigma of contract attorney work” and who have now changed their tune to “well, maybe temping ain’t half bad” as so ably chronicled by Gabe Acevedo in his blog Gabes Guide (click here).

We’re a bit bemused ourselves by the sudden surge in Posse List membership, a large percentage of that increase being ex-AmLaw 200 folks based on the resumes we are receiving.  How much of a threat they will be (will agencies want them?  will law firm want them?) remains to be seen.  A bigger threat is probably going to come from the associates who are still at firms and are using document review as a way to maintain their billable hour requirements.   Paralegals on The Posse List have told us that is happening and that firms have “altered the value” (reduced the bill rate?) to clients. 

The bigger threat to contract attorneys continues to be legal process outsourcing (read: India, mostly).   It’s been going on, really, since 1995.  It took off like a shot in 2001 but seems to have ramped up in the last 5-6 months and was recently stamped “ok” by the ABA opinion along with the 4 collateral state bar opinions, although ABA journal articles from 2005 and 2006 touted off-shoring as a necessary and integral part of law firm management.

Of major recent interest is the new Limited Liability Partnership Act in India (passed last month) which paves the way for foreign law firms to set up shop in India (click here and here).    But it’s not so much the “setting up shop” aspect that intrigues us.  Looking beyond that, it will allow the big UK and US law firms that have been pushing the Indian authorities to change to set-up internal LPO units.   This is not lost on the more savvy Indian LPOs who are scrambling to be in a position to set-up turn-key operations for law firms.   We think an element of off-shore outsourcing is here to stay despite the expected (hopeful?) economic recovery,  just as the traditional document review centers of DC and NYC have lost business to the less expensive venues of Chicago, Pittsburgh, Hosuton/San Antonio and the Carolinas . 

But India is beyond the scope of this posting and will be addressed in a much more detailed posting next week as we attempt to provide the history, scope and future of that aspect of outsourcing (we’ll ignore the growing LPO industries in Egypt, the Philippines and South Africa for the moment).

And perhaps the reality is that a client may not really want to send its work overseas, that these outsourcing discussions really highlight a client’s desire to simply seek lower cost alternatives, including sending work to smaller firms and “farmshoring” —- working with law firms in smaller metropolitan areas where billable rates are lower but quality is just as high, or going with niche firms.

But is all this just due to a brutal economic patch?  Will things “return to normal” and will AmLaw 200  alums return to their happy lairs?  Is there a tectonic shift going on which is now only apparent because of the economic maelstrom?  And what does this all mean for the contract attorney market?  What are the trends?

One of the immediate trends is one we stated in our post-LegalTech review which was that vendors expect a shakedown of the EDD market in the next 12-to-24 months, leaving a handful of big players as opposed to the hordes filling the booths this year. With so many vendors, it’s clear the competition is fierce.  Gartner recently published a detailed market study on the entire e-discovery software/technology industry outlining this shakeout (click here)  

For contract attorneys, it means increasingly streamlined reviews because the level of competition among the software providers is forcing them to spend a lot of time and money into creating products that make them stand out from the rest and ultimately produce more accurate and efficient means of conducting searches as well as more tools to monitor and control costs (including performance metrics).

That, coupled with the “meet and confer” philosophy we discussed in an earlier posting  puts pressure on the parties to devise a very focused (and hence shorter) discovery process.

A second immediate trend is that covered by Charles Skamser in this blog The Ediscovery Paradigm Shift which discusses, amongst other things, the transformation that is going on within the legal market in regards to the paradigm shift of e-discovery being brought in-house by corporations and their use of EDDs to build in-house centers, as evidenced lately by the Kazeon/Suburu match up (click here).

This parallels our LegalTech discussions with in-house counsel who said more legal work is staying inside corporate legal departments and moving away from law firms.  As we profiled in a post a few weeks ago, ACC members have reported a much larger use of contract attorneys in-house, especially in doc reviews and compliance projects.  EDDs have probably made more headway in this than staffing agencies, especially in the early case assessment software area and the “preventive software” area such as data mapping programs.  As several in-house corporate lawyers told us “we’re the front line in e-discovery” and “we need to be in more control, not outside counsel”.   They said “we need to get our digital houses in order” with a dedicated e-discovery coordinator in place.  Well, that’s the mission anyway. 

But doesn’t it appear there really is a tectonic shift going on which is now only apparent because of the economic maelstrom?  We believe there is and no one captures this better than Richard Susskind in his recent book  The End of Lawyers?: Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services  which relates how technology, collaboration, globalization, and other forces are changing the fundamental rules by which legal services are bought and sold.  It’s a sequel to his 1996 book The Future of Law which was right on target in it’s predictions on how the law would be transformed by IT.

And no one covers this tectonic shift better than Jordan Furlong in his blog Law21  which are his “dispatches from a legal profession on the brink”.  Jordon recently reviewed the Susskind book and he’s given us permission to post an excerpt:

The book is characterized by several key observations about how the legal marketplace is being transformed, with three especially significant ones:

1. The identification of an evolving and fluid spectrum of legal services categories: bespoke (one-off, customized or tailored), standardized (drawing upon precedents, process or previous work), systematized (reduced and applied to automated systems), packaged (systematized services exported to clients) and commoditized (packaged services so commonplace as to have little or no market value). Most lawyers insist that their services cluster around the left-hand end of this spectrum; Richard convincingly argues that movement to the right is inevitable for many types of legal services, with profound implications for lawyers’ business models.

2. The decomposition of legal tasks into component parts that can be delegated to various sources, few of them actual law firm lawyers. Twelve types of destinations for this multi-sourcing (reminiscent of unbundling) are identified: in-sourcing, de-lawyering, relocating, offshoring, outsourcing, subcontracting, co-sourcing, leasing, home-sourcing, open-sourcing, computerizing and no-sourcing, each of which is explained in more illuminating detail. Despite this multiplicity of legal work performers, an overarching entity responsible for managing the work must exist, and all the systems and processes involved must work together seamlessly.

3.  In the context of astonishingly deep and rapid technological advances, the emergence of no fewer than ten disruptive (in the Clayton Christensen sense) legal technologies: automated document assembly, relentless connectivity, the electronic legal marketplace, e-learning, online legal guidance, legal open-sourcing, closed legal communities, workflow and project management, embedded legal knowledge, and online dispute resolution. These developments offer tremendous opportunity for more efficient and effective legal services delivery; but they also represent major threats to various aspects of the traditional law firm business model.

For his full review click here.   You can also follow Jordan on Twitter by clicking here.  Jordan also recommends an equally good read,  Bruce Marcus on the massive upheaval in legal practice which you can access here.

There is a lot said in that three paragraph summary and the actual book goes into all the detail.    But it is all driven by two forces:  a market pull towards the commoditization of legal services; and the pervasive development and uptake of new and disruptive legal technologies.

Oh, and our jobs.  The problem is that everyone else has the same problems right now so there’s a need for a personal constructive approach.

And one thing happening is that many laid-off lawyers (and contract atttoneys) are shaking off the “inner hysteria” (Susan Cartier Liebel’s phrase; see below) and going solo, going independent.  See links here, here and here.

And what about being an independent contract attorney?  Possible?  Of course it is.  Hard work?  Of course it is.  But we provide just two examples of how it can be done and how successful you can be:  Kimberly Alderman at Lawyer On! The Contract Attorney’s Blog  and Lisa Solomon at  Legal Research and Writing.

And building a solo practice?  Then start with Susan Cartier Liebel and her blog Building a Solo Practice and Carolyn Elefant at MyShingle.   And check out Rex Gradeless at Social Media Law Student.

And no, we aren’t getting fees for the honorable mentions above.  We are trying to assist the Posse List membership as best we can.  You now number 13,000+ and include lawyers, law students, law firms, EDDs, legal organizations, etc.  Many of you have asked us to cover freelance and “going solo” solo opportunities .

Well, we can’t replicate all the phenomenal sites and bloggers out there that cover freelance, independent contract attorney opportunities and going solo opportunities so what we’ll attempt to do is point you the right direction.  We expect to launch our new site within the next 10 days (Lord willing and the crik don’t rise) and will incorporate a potpourri of links.  And we’ll continue our distribution of news on document review work projects, Federal government projects and the seeming endless stream of foreign language projects in the U.S. and Europe.

In the end, as Jordan Furlong and I believe, the day is coming when the appellation “contract attorney” is a redundancy.  Or as Jordan picks up the theme:  “I can see more and more ‘free agent’ lawyers working when they need/want to, coming together and dispersing on a project-by-project basis, and generally turning on its head the presumption that most lawyers work in law firms”.

Stay tuned.