The End of the the Contract Attorney Era: By Court Mandate

We have discussed Robo Lawyers in the past and how e-discovery conducted by computers will impact the market place for contract attorneys (a.k.a. document review attorneys).  It's my feeling and perhaps the general consensus that contract attorney jobs will dissipate gradually with the ebb and flow of the free market.  Attorneys in India are cheaper than our lawyers, who are heavily laden with the burden of student loan debt.  Then, once clients get the memo that much of contract monkey work can be done by computers, sans attorneys altogether, document review "opportunities" will eventually disappear altogether. However, although covered in 2011, the change did not seem imminent.  After all, it takes a long while for the legal market place to catch up to technology, or so I thought.

Welcome to tomorrow.    Judge Peck of the the Southern District of New York court mandated robo-attorneys for document review--because it's cheaper.  I have practiced in Federal Court and this type of "innovative" idea could catch like wildfire--and spread from one Judge's chambers to the other.  Let's determine how many jobs this type of case would have created.  Apparently, the issue in the case is as follows:

Whether Publicis Groupe compensated female employees less than similarly situated males via salary, bonuses, or perks; precluded or delayed the selection and promotion of females into higher level jobs held by male employees; and carried out terminations or reassignments when the company was reorganized in 2008 that disproportionately impacted female employees.

 I'm thinking this type of case would have provided work for 25 or so contract attorneys.  So, thanks for putting 25 young, starving and possibly homeless contract attorneys out of work, Judge Peck.  I know, it's not his responsibility to make sure that young attorneys are working.  But it's also not his responsibility to make watch the litigants' pockets.  Next he'll be looking at the attorney's bills and deciding whether the work is administrative or legal in nature before the check is cut.  Unless, of course, the legal fees are awarded to the Plaintiff---which could actually be the case here.  Then that does fall within his duties as a judge.  Whatever.  That's not the point.

Litigation is pricey and that is part of what makes the machinery of the legal system turn as it does. To usurp that premise by dictating methods of discovery is... should I say... reversible error?

Let's see what happens. Run, don't walk, away from contract work. It's no place to be when the ground splits open beneath your feet.

Moral of the Story: The government always finds a way to intervene, i.e. ruin, the free market.

The Bottom Falls Out: Welcome to World of Robo Lawyer

Everyone knows that there is a hierarchy of legal jobs.  Big Law is at the top of the pyramid as the aspirational goal for many attorneys.  Mid-sized firms, public interest and government work is mixed in the middle.  Near the bottom is Shit Law Solo Work--which can be gratifying, but hardly pays the bills.   Somewhere below that is contract work--the last resort for many attorneys.  The gigs pay less than they used to, the work is mind numbing and repetitive, and the hours are horrendous... but it is the fall back when there is nothing else out there to do.  Like now, for example.  I actually worked on two contract gigs before becoming a Solo, and I swore I would rather be homeless than have another bout of the flu--brought on by the close, germy, dirty, tight and stuffy work environment.  I actually got the flu 3 times in a 4  month period: stomach, regular, regular.

Thousand of attorneys in New York Shitty live off of contract gigs, hoping to hide out until the economy improves.   Some have made careers of it.  Actually, to many, it seemed like the only healthy part of the legal industry--since Big Law was favoring contract attorneys over first year associates to do the grunt work of document review.  Then the ABA OK'd Indian Lawyers doing the same work for pennies on the dollar.  We thought that gutted the industry.  But now, contract work stands to be eliminated altogether with  the advent of a new discovery software that actually analyzes legal documents.  Yes, it thinks like a lawyer--batteries not included.  The article is short, so here it is:

When five television studios became entangled in a Justice Department antitrust lawsuit against CBS, the cost was immense. As part of the obscure task of “discovery” — providing documents relevant to a lawsuit — the studios examined six million documents at a cost of more than $2.2 million, much of it to pay for a platoon of lawyers and paralegals who worked for months at high hourly rates.

But that was in 1978. Now, thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, “e-discovery” software can analyze documents in a fraction of the time for a fraction of the cost. In January, for example, Blackstone Discovery of Palo Alto, Calif., helped analyze 1.5 million documents for less than $100,000.

Some programs go beyond just finding documents with relevant terms at computer speeds. They can extract relevant concepts — like documents relevant to social protest in the Middle East — even in the absence of specific terms, and deduce patterns of behavior that would have eluded lawyers examining millions of documents.

“From a legal staffing viewpoint, it means that a lot of people who used to be allocated to conduct document review are no longer able to be billed out,” said Bill Herr, who as a lawyer at a major chemical company used to muster auditoriums of lawyers to read documents for weeks on end. “People get bored, people get headaches. Computers don’t.”

Yes, lawyers are the grocery store cashiers of the 00's, the bank tellers of the 90's and the factory workers of the 80's...  We're being replaced by computers.  Could this be the first white collar job to fall to new and innovative technology?  And we thought the service sector was safe.  Terminator is becoming more real to me every day.

Thanks for the tip, Reader!