Responsive Documents 2.0

New Style and Market for Paul Mark Sandler's "Anatomy of a Trial"

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Godfrey) — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 18:44:00 +0000

Daily Record, December 22, 2008:

For Paul Mark Sandler’s "Anatomy of a Trial: A Primer for Young Lawyers," the Maryland Institute for Continuing Professional Education of Lawyers Inc. abandoned its traditional two-toned book cover in favor of something that wouldn’t look out of place in, say, a Barnes & Noble or an airport mini-mall.

...

While Maryland remains MICPEL’s primary focus, Burry said, the organization is promoting "Anatomy" not only in California, where the case was tried, but also in New York and other metropolitan areas. This is the first book the organization has marketed nationally.

...

Sandler, of Shapiro Sher Guinot & Sandler P.A. in Baltimore, "was really excited about documenting his experience in the trial and trying to make the book more broadly appealing than just to our traditional Maryland audience but to a national audience of younger practitioners and litigations," said Burry. "With that in mind, we wanted to give [the book] a little more of a polish and broader appeal."

I have never met Mr. Sandler, but continue even at the beginning of my 16th year of practice to be impressed at the rich detail and usefulness of "Pleading Causes of Action in Maryland" by Mr. Sandler and his co-author James Archibald, Esq., of Venable.

I am less interested in the glossy, trade-paperback style of Mr. Sandler's new book than in the fact that Maryland is getting some exposure in the legal community and that MICPEL can get some sales revenue from beyond Maryland's boundaries.

E-Discovery Labor Market December 2008

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Godfrey) — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 19:50:00 +0000

My general impression is that the e-discovery labor market is now (mid-December 2008) bad, improved from terrible/hideous/catastrophically putrid, but actually pretty good for attorneys with language expertise in specific language including (happily for this writer) German and also Polish. Without identifying specifics, I am getting pelted with calls to join projects and am employed with big overtime hours. More cases are coming in on the Posse List. This is significant because December is usually something of a fasting month for contract attorneys rather than a month of famine relief.

Agency contacts described the October/November contract attorney market as "hideous" and, in one case, the worst that she/he had seen since 9/11.

I suspect that a combination of the drop in oil prices, the likelihood of more bailout money from the federal government economy-wide and the stabilizing effect of the end of the U.S. presidential election (and possibly the particular winner, though that's very speculative) all enabled December to be a market up-tick on net in this peculiar, volatile sub-sub-sector.

e-discovery 2.0: Top 5 E-Discovery Cases of the Year

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Godfrey) — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 19:32:00 +0000

Check out the recent article by Clearwell Systems' Dean Gonsowski on the five most important cases of this past year for e-discovery teams, of which two were written by the Honorable Paul Grimm of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland.

Gonsowski cited the Creative Pipe case as the most important, in which Judge Grimm ruled that keyword search term selection is beyond the skill set of most lay people and lawyers, i.e. is a topic requiring particularized expertise for baseline competence and reliability.

Go check out the whole article for a survey of this growing field.

Paying $35/hour, Billing Out At $500.00??

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Godfrey) — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 04:28:00 +0000

"Law Blog" of the Wall Street Journal, November 24, 2008:

Here’s a question: After a big class-action settlement, how much should a plaintiffs’ firm be allowed to recover for its use of temporary lawyers? As much as $100 per hour? $200 per hour? More?

...

According to the story, Stephen Vasil, a Yale Law School graduate, and Andrew Gilman, a New York University law grad, were hired through a temp agency to work on the Xerox case. Vasil says they often performed work that didn’t exactly require their pricey law degrees, including reviewing electronic documents to identify their author and destination. Vasil was paid $35 an hour, Gilman, $40. Yet the law firms in the case are asking for roughly $500 an hour for their services.

HAT TIP to Joe Miller.

To stress, in a class action case the client class is not paying out of pocket for legal services. This is an attempt to get "quantum meruit", the fair market value of attorney time and skill. Now law firms, like every other capitalist operation, attempt to charge more for labor than they spend on it; this is literally the definition of profit. But the fair market value of doing work that a 12 year-old not only could do, but probably could do better than a 27 year-old attorney, is not $500.00.

To compare, after ten years as a licensed attorney, I was billing out at about $200/hour in metropolitan Baltimore. A recent law grad doing sub-paralegal work, secretarial work even, does not get to charge what junior partners in large corporate law firms charge. So under quantum meruit the law firm cannot recoup that either, realistically.

I have done a lot of document review, most of it multi-lingual work and a lot of it involving privilege log production. Some of it is mind-numbingly simple. Some of it is quite challenging, especially the multi-lingual work when you are trying to apply conservative privilege standards to communications, i.e. a few grunts and terse, oblique references, in German dialect. Or when you are trying to smoke out evidence of a conspiracy of horizontal price-fixing from a few untyped "winks and nods" in an email exchange in German. But I have also billed time for work that could have been done more easily by a teenager with a B+ or better in English. Sometimes you get to do brain surgery, and sometimes you are just counting boogers. Those tasks bill out the same if there's a contract, but only then.

Fired After Three Days On A Document Review? Something's Fishy.

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Godfrey) — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 02:47:00 +0000

A friend forwarded me this from the Maryland State Bar Association Estates & Trust Section email list-serv. Modified slightly to protect the accused.

I have recently heard some disturbing news through the grape vine that there were people "let go" on a recent document review project involving the law firm of [WITHHELD] for no apparent reason, and with no prior warnings given. The problem is, is that the people who were let go from this project were all minorities; two African-American males, and a woman of Arabic [sic] descent. [WITHHELD] let go of these three people supposedly for coding issues and productivity; the "usual" reasons given. The problem is, is that these three minorities were let go three days into the project. As we all know, there will be coding issues 3 days into a project. That is the norm. What is equally disturbing, is that the next day, the project mananger who is from a temp agency beginning with the letter "[WITHHELD]" lied to the rest of the contract attorneys on the project and told them that the attorneys who were not present were "let go" because they were given prior warnings about their productivity. These three minorities were never given prior warnings. It is also interesting to note that there were only three African-American males out of a group of 50 contract attroneys on this project. Now there is only one left. All of the minority attorneys on this project are now in fear that they will be let go with no warning based on their race. This is very sad; especially when we think America has moved forward in issues concerning race after the election of Barack Obama. This example, if true, shows that there is still a contingent of people in this country that are still in favor of pepetuating racial hatred. In this instance, on a "professional" level. If [WITHHELD] continue to allow their agents to racially discriminate in this manner, eventually they will open themselves up to a law suit. The attorneys in question are considering their options at this moment. Please pass this message along to other members on the listserv.

Well, here are my thoughts.

1) The proper way to handle this suit, both ethically and tactically, is NOT to slam the law firm or the agency on a Bar Association list-serv. There are not THAT many document review agencies in DC; naming the first letter of the name of the agency in question really limits it down, and naming the law firm (as the original of this blast did) may violate the confidentiality agreement that the contract attorney signed. Of course, it's not clear whether this story reflects facts or who the real OR purported authors are. The proper way to handle a discrimination claim in DC is to file administratively with the EEOC, with the DC Human Rights Office or directly in DC Superior Court which is permitted under local law (unlike many jurisdictions where you need a local or federal "right to sue" letter after exhausting administrative remedies.) The list-serv is not the proper forum for this, period.

2) I will not identify the law firm here but will note that this rather large law firm does NOT have an office in Maryland and does NOT have an estates and trust, asset planning, tax or probate department. Accordingly, this firm's or this case's relevance to Maryland estates and trusts lawyers seems scant at best.

3) It is true that 3 days into a project is an unusually short period in which to get let go. Any long project will want to see a larger sample of work and any short project probably cannot afford to lose working human resources in the face of a severe deadline.

4) It is certainly not impossible for a document review law firm or agency to discriminate on the basis of race, but doc review is "blacker" than the bar at large, in part because both document review attorneys and African-American attorneys skew young, and because doc review doesn't require hobnob social connections to make pretty good money to pay off loans and in part because it's somewhat concentrated in cities with substantial African-American professional communities at large such as Washington. African-American attorneys are probably more student-loan ridden than their white counterparts and are less able to use Grandpa's trust money to fund half of their rent while they work for an upper-stratosphere non-profit or on Capitol Hill as a staff attorney.

My hunch is that document review is less racially discriminatory than other areas of practice because the end user often does not see the face or picture of the first reviewer, the clients almost never see the reviewers (and so it's not client bigotry), and because production is easier to measure objectively in this area than in many others. Racial discrimination is always stupid and immoral but when stupidity burns the hands of the stupid (in terms of associates blowing deadlines from firing good people stupidly, etc.), the stupid start seeing through to getting smarter.

5) Getting fired for no apparent reason is commonplace in document review. The nicer agencies and firms will give you a day's notice if a project is contracting. Others will tell you to pack up your desk daily and if you get called at home or on your cell at 8:50 PM, you probably got fired and should file for unemployment the following 9:00 AM. Sometimes you get feedback; usually you don't. I (and supposedly a third of my project) got fired from my very first project in 2005; I assume it might have been due to poor "n00bie" workmanship on my part but it could easily have been something as simple as last hired, first fired on a contraction. Again, however, getting fired after three days is very unusual in the absence of hard-core screwing off, failure to show up or violation of house rules like misuse of the internet or billing fraud.

My analysis: I elect not to believe the accuracy of this email. It fails to meet my "sniff" test.

Welcome to Responsive Documents 2.0

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Godfrey) — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 03:58:00 +0000

I hope that you enjoy and find useful the resources here at www.responsivedocuments.com. This blog aims to serve some underserved parts of the legal profession; attorneys whose careers don't fit into the traditional law firm associate-to-partner model.

This blog is the grandson/granddaughter of Crablaw Maryland Weekly, a blog focused primarily on local politics and social issues in Maryland. That blog is now the WB&A Blog that you may seek linked in the left column. Crablaw/WB&A deal primarily with local issues, but I put a decent amount of attorney specialist material into that site also.

About 6 months ago, I moved a lot of my professional materials into this web domain, and organized some job search content within Drupal. I came not to disfavor Drupal when its formatting limitations for my readers' (and my) specific needs became more and more apparent, and I returned to Google's Blogger.com platform.

I formed Good Catch Media earlier this year and separated my several blogging efforts into market segments, reflected on the icons to the left. Good Catch Media will be keeping the Drupal skeleton for old Responsive Documents 1.0 for a while - maybe indefinitely. Meanwhile, expect to see growth and development here to assist your professional growth and development. You will see a lot of material on the practice of law, the economics of law and lawyering, practical tips for job survival, humor, legal analysis, you name it. This is Good Catch Media's law publishing node; hope you have a blast.

Under construction

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Godfrey) — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 17:58:00 +0000

as should be apparent