The Hell of Document Review

Law Tales #3

After I had been practicing law for awhile and made a bit of money, I left to go pursue a PhD in history. To make some money during this time I worked in a niche legal area called “Legal Services” doing “document review”.

In the process of the growth of Big Law and modernization, a business model of outsourcing legal discovery on huge legal matters grew. Here is how it started: giant law firm suddenly needs to review 4 million documents by lawyers in a short time. It put its new associates doing so, making them work long hours just looking at documents and seeing which ones are relevant to the matter and which ones are privileged and which ones need redaction.

Now, the Big Law firm is making a killing on this, because it is requiring so many hours of these young associates, but effectively paying them less than $40 an hour, while billing the client at $450 an hour (numbers are not exactly accurate but close enough). The process is only process is really only possible due to computers, though was done without computers in earlier eras.

Because it just didn't have enough lawyers and didn't want to commit to hiring more young associates (in case of an another legal market recession which seems to happen once a decade), it contracts with a legal services firm to provide more attorneys. The legal services firm then advertises a job and brings attorneys on a temporary basis. The cost to the law firm is the same and it still billed out the outsourced attorneys at the same rate as its own associates.

Eventually major clients got wise to this and starting paying the legal services firms directly and requiring that their Big Law attorneys use these services. This led to less Big Law jobs.

Doc review, whether inside Big Law or with legal services companies, so beyond numbing drudgery. Sit in front of a computer all day, reading different documents and emails, and then mark into which categories these fall.

On my first project there were already 150 lawyers who had worked for a year on the project. They added 550 more, including me. We were required to work 12 hours days 5 days a week, with an occasional weekend day as well. It was an antitrust project evolving a major sector of the country and we were worked for an extremely well known company which was trying to change its industry. The paycheck was very good, as much as I made as a practicing attorney, which was great for a grad student in the summer.

Yet there wasn't enough work. We would sit around for hours without work. We were required to be at our computers 15 minutes of every hour, even if there was no work. I started taking long walks around the downtown area where we worked. I brought books to read.

When there was work it was mind-numbing. We were just for show, so that the client could say it had hired 700 attorneys to work on reviewing these documents.

The industry doesn't want the attorney to work too fast, as the legal services firms get paid by the hour. They estimated the job and bid on it, and of the attorneys went too fast, it cost them profits.

What type of attorneys did this sort of work? All types. We had retired lawyers just earning a few extra dollars. We had new graduates who couldn't find jobs. We had lawyers transitioning to be careers and using this part time. We had really good attorneys who had been downsized. Attorneys between full time jobs were common. I worked with parents who decided that occasional work to add money for expenses. There were also solo practitioners trying to get a little extra.

The work was easy enough if one could put up with drudgery of it. Some people made a full time job of it. It wasn't law to me, as I spent so much time at court. Not having to write pleadings or go to court had some benefits, for sure.

I ended up doing a bunch of projects for a huge variety of companies. Almost every company was a top 200 company.

In another post, I will discuss my experience with a pharma matter and how I learned to trust nothing pharma claims.