Data explosion means more work, but computers may soon do those jobs

By Christine Simmons, Missouri Lawyers Weekly

Lawyers don’t need to sift through dusty boxes anymore to find documents.

They’ve shifted to tapping away at computer keyboards, paging through PDFs, looking for information relevant to their client’s suit. And with more data, emails, texts and the like, the need for document review attorneys has never been greater.

But increasingly sophisticated software is being developed to help lawyers cull e-discovery documents, with the eventual hope of cutting back on lawyers’ time in the process.

Although it can sound like another threat to jobs in a profession most recently afflicted by layoffs and downsizing, lawyers in Missouri say it’s not that simple. Some lawyers and legal staffing agencies say the technology has not led to hiring fewer associates and contract attorneys.

Instead, job duties are changing. And some firms, even with the technology, have been hiring more people for document review.

That is now. Some lawyers say in the not-too-distant future document review duties may be overtaken by computers, saving time and money, but eliminating a niche for new attorneys.

Within the firm

Law firms are inundated with choices of quickly advancing technology. Some of the well-known providers include kCura’s Relativity, Clearwell Systems and Equivio.

For example, the Clearwell technology guides lawyers through a multilevel filtering process. Users can search through different categories of documents, such as file types and dates. They can continue to sort by language topic and eliminate duplicate papers.

Users can then do searches by key words and searches by concept.

Leaders at some Missouri law firms indicate that this filtering process, which allows lawyers to significantly reduce the number of documents they need to review, still isn’t killing jobs.

Kansas City plaintiffs firm Stueve Siegel Hanson regularly handles commercial litigation involving huge amounts of electronically stored documents. They use software that allows them to make sophisticated searches — but that doesn’t mean they’ve cut back on document reviewers.

The firm has hired four staff attorneys in the past three years primarily for document review, said Patrick Stueve, a founding firm partner.

“There’s just more data, even with using the search terms, than there has been in the past, and that’s why we’ve had to hire more attorneys,” said Stueve, a member of a panel the Missouri Supreme Court appointed to evaluate e-discovery issues.

Lawyers point to ever-increasing email inboxes and hard drives, more places to store information and longer periods of document storage. All this has meant document production during litigation discovery has exploded in volume.

Bryan Cave, Missouri’s highest-grossing law firm, gave permanent jobs to eight temporary employees last August so they can focus on discovery projects, said Joy Holley, director of a new team at Bryan Cave dedicated to e-discovery services and litigation support.

“We made permanent what were previously temporary positions,” she said, because the firm found there was a constant influx of discovery work.

The firm started the discovery team in May 2010. It’s composed of the eight attorneys who work with about 35 to 40 contract attorneys who review documents.

Lawyers say e-discovery also has created a new niche. Tech-savvy lawyers can stand out by focusing on e-discovery in their firms while firms are hiring e-discovery technology specialists.

For example, Bryan Cave has six technology specialists responsible for complying for technological requirements of e-discovery, Holley said.

Evolving duties

Before Bryan Cave started its e-discovery team, firm associates were typically performing document review, she said. Now that agency attorneys are doing document review, firm associates are helping to supervise the agency attorneys, Holley said. “It a different distribution of the labor,” she said.

At Shook, Hardy & Bacon, which focuses on complex litigation, the number of firm attorneys working in discovery and document review has stayed about the same over the years, said Denise Talbert, chairwoman of the firm’s e-discovery, data and document management practice.

But nowadays, fewer firm attorneys have document review duties. Instead they are overseeing e-discovery projects or consulting in e-discovery, she said. “I don’t think it has affected who we hire,” Talbert said. Instead, she said, it has caused “individuals to retool their expertise.”

For large-scale projects at Lathrop & Gage, the trend is reviewing documents outside the firm through contract attorneys or through overseas out-sourcing companies, said Robin Stewart, chairwoman of Lathrop & Gage’s e-discovery practice group. Firm attorneys still supervise the projects this way, she said.

“Oftentimes it will be less costly for the clients,” she said.

And this shift of work outside of the firm hasn’t influenced the number of associates the firm hires, Stewart said. Instead, associates at Lathrop are doing more substantive work, such as trials, brief writing and supervising first-level reviewers, she said.

Contract jobs

Although some document review work may be going overseas and technology vendors say firms can spend less on contract attorneys, four legal staffing firms with offices in Missouri insist they haven’t noticed less demand for their contract attorneys — positions that often give new attorneys experience. They say business is up.

Carrie Titus, division director for legal staffing firm Robert Half Legal in St. Louis, said she has seen an increase in requests from law firms and businesses for discovery attorneys.

“Just the amount of data out there has increased so much. That’s increased the need for attorneys,” said Titus, who is also the membership chairwoman of the organization Women in E-Discovery.

She said Robert Half Legal also is getting specific requests for attorneys with experience in e-discovery.

At Hudson Legal, a new legal staffing agency in St. Louis, the number of contract attorneys employed varies week to week. But Andy Jewel, a senior vice president of Hudson Legal, said he hasn’t seen a drop in overall demand.

Jewel said he believes improved economic conditions have partly lifted demand.

Andrew Koshner, president of another St. Louis legal staffing firm, JurisTemps, echoed comments from his competitors. “We’ve probably seen more projects and more attorneys being employed across the board,” he said.

And Hire Counsel, with offices in Kansas City and St. Louis, among other cities, has also seen business rise, said Chief Operating Officer Willa Fawer.

Talbert said Shook Hardy & Bacon didn’t use contract attorneys before e-discovery boomed because there were fewer documents during those times.

The firm employs some now, but in recent years it has needed fewer contract attorneys to review documents, she said. That’s partly because clients are directing document reviews themselves, she said.

Alex Buck has seen this firsthand. Buck was formerly director and senior counsel for e-discovery and records management at Abbott Laboratories. When she started in 2007, she was the company’s only in-house lawyer focused on e-discovery. When she left last year, she had a team of nine legal staff focused on e-discovery services.

Buck said corporate legal departments have taken on more e-discovery functions in the past three years, such as data collection and data processing, and this is leading to more in-house legal jobs.

“It’s an area of growth internally,” said Buck, now e-discovery and technology counsel for the Bartlit Beck Herman Palenchar & Scott law firm in Chicago.

Technology advances

Costs for e-discovery technology services are hard to pin down because they’re based on how a firm or company accesses the services and the size and length of the project. Talbert said the services can vary from $10,000 to more than $100,000. “It is truly all over the place,” she said. “It is so volume dependant.”

According to a Robert Half Legal study, e-discovery costs consume about a quarter of clients’ litigation budgets. But the competition among e-discovery vendors is helping to drive down the costs of technology, Talbert said.

The next stage of e-discovery is “predictive coding,” technology that automatically categorizes documents based on a sample of documents that have already been coded.

Predictive coding hasn’t gained widespread acceptance yet, said Christian Lawrence, chief executive officer of SFL Data, a San Francisco-based e-discovery services provider.

But, he said, “I think it’s the next wave.”

There are still issues with the e-discovery technology, though. Lawyers say they sometimes have to revise their searches to make sure they were effective.

Stewart, the Lathrop & Gage lawyer, points to risk associated with automatic review such as not finding certain documents and letting attorney-client privileged documents slip, which could put clients at risk.

“I haven’t seen a machine that can replace a lawyer’s sense of analysis,” said Joy, from Bryan Cave.

But Lawrence, from SFL Data, and others said predictive coding and advances in e-discovery technology will eventually reduce the demand to hire document review attorneys for projects with a similar volume of data.

“If I were the CEO of a pure document staffing by-the-hour business, I’d be scared,” Lawrence said in an email.

For Stinson Morrison Hecker, the e-discovery technology has already helped the firm employ fewer contract attorneys than it did about five years ago on a project that had the same number of documents, said Don Ramsay, one of the firm’s attorneys who focus on e-discovery.

“I believe the technology allows us to go through the documents with less time and a fewer number of people,” he said. “That trend will continue.”