Lawyer’s Lament: Pressure to Review 80 Docs an Hour, for $23 an Hour

df
Oct 21, 2009 9:19 AM CST

I did document review in the past, and fortunately (and correctly/ethically) every assignment explicitly (verbal and written directives) put quality of review #1 (speed, though important, was clearly #2).

If I had a bunch of 1-page meeting reminders or something, sure I could easily do even a few hundred an hour (unless there were system problems). But anything more complicated than that, forget 80 an hour. Not possible with any meaningful consideration of whether the document was relevant, privileged, contained private information, etc.

If I was representing a party in a proceeding where the other side had used a contract lawyer (or outsourced) document review team, I would be searching the law and rules for any basis upon which to question the procedure used for reviewing e-discovery documents. If ever I could find some basis to examine a contract reviewer under oath, unless they perjured themselves the chances of a woefully inadequate review having been performed is probably pretty good, at least in some markets (not, as noted, my own past experience).

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AndytheLawyer
Oct 21, 2009 9:31 AM CST

The obvious solution = outsource the work to India, where 300 documents can be reviewed for $5.00 per hour by people whose first language is not English.  Equivalent quality results can be obtained by taking all the documents to the top of the stairs, throwing them up in the air and then only reviewing the documents that land on the top 5 steps.

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capplebaum
Oct 21, 2009 10:06 AM CST

Lawyers should, but they won’t.  With families to feed people will rush to please whomever is providing the paycheck.

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Christine Guamole
Oct 21, 2009 10:25 AM CST

What do you expect a low level doc reviewer to do?  Storm out of the project and accuse their employer of being unethical?  That’s a sure way to NEVER find work again.  Thank goodness there are anonymous blogs for people to whistleblow against these practices.  The ABA and state bars are only interested in protecting the elite golden children.

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John
Oct 21, 2009 10:53 AM CST

Michael,

The concept of privileged and confidential information is not applicable to a document review attorney complaining to a third party that he or her employer - in this case the hiring placement agency - is pressuring the complainer to review documents at an unrealistic pace.  Would those same reviewers be breaching the same confidentiality obligations if there were to write to friends about a repressing working environment under which they work. 
Those type of communications to the pubilc should not jeopardize any confidentiality as they do not relate to the substance of the legal matter for which they are engaged. 
If opposing counsel gets wind of this email originally sent out to Temporary Attorney, the blame lies squarely with the Juristaff who sent out the email.

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Joe
Oct 21, 2009 11:37 AM CST

The bigger issue here is not the amount of time spent reviewing these documents, but rather the fact that such document-intensive litigation exists in the first place.  I understand that now everything is electronic which exponentially increases what is available to be reviewed, but there has not been any success in reining in the scope and expense of discovery.  With this situation, lawyers are spending more time reviewing irrelevant documents than arguing the merits of their client’s position.
I am well-acquainted with the legal systems in multiple European countries.  Particularly those countries with civil law systems, there is simply not this problem of cases that require hundreds of contract lawyers to review documents 15 hours a day. That in turn lowers litigation costs and allows companies to compete better.  While the current discovery protocols enrich U.S. lawyers, they are contributing to the increasingly difficult financial conditions being faced by American companies.

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Christine Guacamole
Oct 21, 2009 11:47 AM CST

Enrich US lawyers?  At 23 bucks an hour?  If electronic discovery is so expensive, it certainly isn’t the fault of the contract attorneys.  The reason electronic discovery is so expensive is because of the high markup’s added on by the law firms and staffing agencies.  With all this money these companies are paying they are getting low quality/high volume review work done in oftentimes sweatshop work environments.

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David Smith
Oct 21, 2009 12:10 PM CST

And after the profits from these low wages and fast reviews are funneled up the food chain, guess who they are going to blame when things get screwed up?

“Like Rodney Dangerfield, contract lawyers don’t get no respect. While law firms earn substantial profits off the labor of contract attorneys, these lawyers have no job security, work long hours but aren’t necessarily entitled to overtime and they don’t have any bargaining power to demand better. To top it all off, contract attorneys also get the blame when things go wrong, reports The Recorder.

Apparently, two critical e-mails in a stock option prosecution against McAfee’s former general counsel weren’t turned over because temp attorneys had marked them as not relevant, Howrey partner Robert Gooding Jr. explained to federal district judge Marilyn Hall Patel.  Gooding characterized the error as inadvertent, and said senior lawyers were supposed to have reviewed the contract lawyers’ work but somehow the mistake was overlooked.  Defense lawyers weren’t convinced, and filed a motion to dismiss shortly after the hearing.”

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guest
Oct 21, 2009 12:23 PM CST

I can’t even believe that the ABA is lamenting the underpaid / overworked conditions in the American legal world.  Wasn’t it the gold old ABA that authorized offshoring of legal jobs to the third world (08-451) which, in turn, has directly caused this situation?  Wake up! And undo that disastrous decision on outsourcing!

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anonymous
Oct 21, 2009 12:44 PM CST

What is truly lamentable is that the ABA and local bar associations have effectively dumbed-down the legal profession via offshoring attorney jobs. The American bar had been a distinguished and dignified group of highly educated, bright people who were attracted to the law not only because of the better-than-average pay and rewards, but also because of the comraderly nature of the bar itself.  By commoditizing the value of a lawyer’s skills, bar associations have not only disgraced a once prestigious profession but have also caused public contempt and infighting within the bar and public contempt against clients as well.  Even if the outsourcing/offshoring opinion is undone, the bar will probably never recover from this period when lawyers could not count on each other or their guilds for guidance.

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stepheng
Oct 21, 2009 2:10 PM CST

One could well question, under those circumstances, the accuracy of any statement of due dilligence set forth in any response to an inspection demand aserting that no such documents as requested exist.

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MacTheKnife
Oct 21, 2009 2:33 PM CST

#15 and t#20 - Unless you just stepped out of a time machine that travelled about 2 decades to the present, it’s hard to reconcile your statements about lawyer compensation with this little thing that the rest of us like to call “reality”.  The legal profession, on average, does not remunerate “its members much higher than most other industries in this country” in general, and in particular for those positions in other industries that require graduate degrees that generally exceed 100k in tuition costs, and have cyclical licensing fees, and continuing education fees.  Unless your are guiled by the misleading salary statistics put out by law schools, NALPA and the ABA, you have to realize that the average salary of practicing attorneys, while difficult to nail down, is significantly less than what those institutions claim and some studies claim that avaerage attorney compensation for entry level lawyers may be $50k or less.

Of course those who manage to eventually develop a decent private practice may eventually see a six figure income that is greater than comparable counterparts with equal education in other industries, but that is by virtue of the fact that the structure of private practice is ultimately one that ends in attrition or equity which doesn’t exist in other industries where income for those counterparts may not align.

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Esq.
Oct 21, 2009 2:59 PM CST

The staffing firms (and the law firms that hire them) need to stop being so damned cheap.  At $23/hr they can afford to pay a few more people to work on each job and to reduce the workload.  Does pinching a few pennies on the front end really justify losing hundreds of thousands of dollars, and their reputation when they miss that smoking gun document?

And really, where is the incentive for any individual document reviewer to do a decent job?

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bg
Oct 21, 2009 6:20 PM CST

Unless you are producing the documents, what opposing counsel thinks of your speedy review is irrelevant.  After all, it is your client that gets hurt, not the other side.  In fact, it usually works out to the other side’s advantage if you do a lousy job.

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B. McLeod
Oct 22, 2009 12:40 AM CST

To hear of developments such as this is truly disheartening.  I think if I ever landed in a spot where I really wasn’t allowed to do any work in a way that was competent or produced value, whatever someone was willing to pay me for that would not keep me in the legal profession.

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tstone
Oct 22, 2009 6:15 AM CST

They don’t care about quality.  They just want to claim that they had licensed monkeys reviewing X number of documents in a certain timeframe.

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X
Oct 22, 2009 7:58 AM CST

There is no free market capitalism when the government subsidizes the loans for law students.  It iis a government created oversupply benefitting law schools, banks corporations and big law to the detriment of the lawyers fraudulently induced into attending law school based on misleading employment statistics.  The result is a class of wage slaves, or unemployed overeducated debt slaves, with ruined lives.

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teagle
Oct 22, 2009 9:12 AM CST

This problem is only going to get worse.  As the legal market becomes even more saturated and as kids come out of school with even higher loads of debt, things will continue to deteriorate.  Desperation and debt leads to exploitation and the collapse of professional standards.

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Mike S
Oct 22, 2009 9:28 AM CST

@37: I don’t understand how you can have uniform bar exams without uniform state laws, but anyway…increasing the portability of law degrees is a good thing.  The difficulty of becoming licensed in a new state is part of why people accept these horrible jobs in states particularly overstuffed with lawyers.

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x
Oct 22, 2009 11:13 AM CST

The supply of lawyers far exceeds the demand and has for years.  Outsourcing compounds the problem.  The law schools publish fraudulent employment statistics to lure applicants into indebting themselves and ruining their futures by going to law school with little hope of finding a job.  The rate of lawyer unemployment is high, has been for years, and this fact is ignored by the ABA.  It is fraud, pure and simple.  The federal government needs to limit the number of loans given to law students.  It is a system that benefits banks, law schools and big law, while ruining the lives of the suckers who believed the there was employment opportunity in the law.  Big law benefits by having countless numbers of wage slave doc reviewers to staff projects at low wages while charging premium fees for their labor.  Society is plagued with frivolous lawsuits by lawyers scrounging to make a living.  The profession is destroyed by unethical behavior induced by intense job competition.  There is no market supply/demand principle in effect when government subsidizes an unlimited amount of law school loans.  Supply far exceeds demand, and no real statistics are kept on unemployment and underemployment which compounds the disaster.  The legal profession is being diluted and dissolved by self interested forces with no ability to see consequences.  It is an atrocity and a disgrace.

In a nutshell, as long as lawyers have no job security and can easily be replaced then unethical conduct will flourish.  Just witness recent events.  A contract attorney scrounging to pay his/her debts off at $23 per hour is not in the posiiton to challange the unethical conduct of the law firm demanding unrealistic produciton.

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X
Oct 22, 2009 1:38 PM CST

The supply of lawyers exceeds demand when there are far more lawyers than available jobs, as is the case at present and as has been the case for probably the last 10 years at least.  Sure, if one had no debt they could survive for 25k a year as a lawyer, but this does not reflect reality as it takes training to become a lawyer and this is refelcted in fees.  Everyone could drive a Rolls Royce if they didn’t cost anything to produce.  However, they do cost something to produce and if too many are produced than production must be decreased lest there be a lot of unsold Rolls Royces’ sitting in parking lots depreciating in value.  And if far too may are produced than RR goes into bankruptcy.  The tragedy lies in the fact that we are not discussing autos but people who are turned into unemployable debt slaves becuase of lack of demand and depreciating skills.

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BL1Y
Oct 23, 2009 3:55 AM CST

One time I reviewed 7000 documents in one hour.

How fast you can go all depends on what types of documents you have and what the nature of the case you’re working on is.  If you’re reviewing documents on a sexual harassment claim and have 100 e-mails titled Daily Asian Liquidity Report with 3 spreadsheet attachments on each, it takes about a minute to “review” all 400 of those documents.

Document review is essentially two different processes.  The first is what most people think of, actually reading documents and checking for relevance (and privilege if you’re on the producing side).  The second is sorting potentially relevant documents from obviously junk documents.  It’s unlikely that an incoming e-mail report from Bloomberg that was sent to tens of thousands of other people worldwide is going to be a hot doc.  I did a review where my share was about 30,000 documents, and of those I had at least 1,000 Bloomberg reports.  If I went at 60 docs an hour, these docs would have cost the client around $5,000.  Sorting them as obvious junk costs about $30.  I think I made the ethical decision.

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Mladen
Oct 23, 2009 6:03 AM CST

It is a joke we see happening more and more often. We do try to explain clients there is no way that they will get the same quality of legal work. There is just no way to provide meaningful input under such conditions. this is likely to get worse over the years as the Bar gets deregulated and supermarket chains start offering legal advice, wills etc. Anyone interested might want to read “The End of Lawyers” by Richard Susskind.

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Peter314
Oct 23, 2009 7:02 AM CST

With a JD and a BSEE or a Ph. D. in molecular biology or pharmaceutical chemistry or organic chemistry, etc., and a passing grade on the patent bar exam you should find a decent job.

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Going Insane
Oct 23, 2009 8:35 AM CST

I am currently on that project.  This morning we were informed that there was a problem with payroll and that we were not going to be paid on time.  I wonder what my landlord will say tonight when I inform him that he will not be paid on time.  Going to law school has literally been the NIGHTMARE FROM HELL and THE WORST DECISION OF MY LIFE.  An awful sweatshop place, no health insurance, buried under massive non-dischargeable student loans, and no paycheck.

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