Leaving Big Law Behind

Much of what we've been discussing on this blog for the past year went mainstream last week, with Slate profiling the evolving Big Law model as a field "rife with upheaval".

Listed as one of Slate's five most read articles, the piece touched on many of the hot buttons that insiders have been watching, including:

• The assault on the billable hour, via The Economist.

• The wide range of alternative models currently testing the waters.

• Outsourcing internationally to teams of attorneys in India, via the New York Times.

• Onshoring to lower cost regions within the U.S., via The Washington Post.

• The Great Recession's squeeze on the legal field.

The article also identifies "companies below the $100 million revenue level" as the primary target clients of Big Law ex pats.

Finally, the piece notes that the transformation taking place in the business of law is not unique; rather it is simply the legal profession catching up with most other industries:

"Partners who ditch overcomplicated Big Law practices for nimble, flexible shops that facilitate simpler client relationships are like other denizens of the little-guy economy."

E-Discovery and Social Networking

Here we have the inevitable collision of two massive movements.

The first is e-discovery, which over the last decade has moved from a subset of discovery to its own umbrella, covering email, IM chats, databases, CAD files, web sites, and any other electronically-stored information that could be relevant evidence in a law suit.

The second is social networking. Facebook, twitter, and myspace may be the best known, but there are also LinkedIn, Xanga, Badoo, Migente, Orkut, Studivz, Bebo, and hundreds if not thousands of more niche specific networks.

The wrinkle with social networking networking sites as they pertain to e-discovery is that they are very transient; pertinent information may only be online for days at a time.

Last week TechnoLawyer featured a product called Cloud Preservation, which is an online e-discovery service that archives and preserves content from Web sites, blogs, and social media.

According to TechnoLawyer:

"The people who work at your company (your clients for those of you who serve as outside counsel) continually add to, delete from, update, and refine your corporate Web sites, blogs, Facebook fan pages, Twitter accounts, and more. Nextpoint designed Cloud Preservation to automatically crawl these online properties at predefined intervals, creating a comprehensive and searchable archive of this content, including HTML source code and images."

While it obviously doesn't archive retroactively (although webarchive.org is an interesting source for websites pre-2009), anyone with a hint of advance notice can specify sites to monitor, thus precluding any possible spoliation.

Also, from the Cloud Preservation site comes the cryptic offer of a preferred customer program for "Corporations, consultants, law firms, and any organization interested in volume pricing with fewer restrictions."

The New York Times Spotlights Legal Services Outsourcing

The New York Times ran an article this week on the continued growth in the legal services outsourcing sector.

Highlights from the piece include:

• "India’s legal outsourcing industry has grown in recent years... to a small but mainstream part of the global business of law. Cash-conscious Wall Street banks, mining giants, insurance firms and industrial conglomerates are hiring lawyers in India for document review, due diligence, contract management and more."

• “This is not a blip, this is a big historical movement,” said David B. Wilkins, director of Harvard Law School’s program on the legal profession. “There is an increasing pressure by clients to reduce costs and increase efficiency,” he added, and with companies already familiar with outsourcing tasks like information technology work to India, legal services is a natural next step."

• "Employees at legal outsourcing companies in India are not allowed by Indian law to give legal advice to clients in the West, no matter their qualifications. Instead, legal outsourcing companies perform a lot of the functions that a junior lawyer might do in a American law firm."

• According to Janine Dascenzo, associate general counsel at General Electric, while G.E. “will continue to go to big firms for lawyers who are experts in subject matter, world-class thought leaders and the best litigators," what G.E. does not need is the “army of associates around them. You don’t need a $500-an-hour associate to do things like document review and basic due diligence,” she said.

• "Thanks to India’s low wages and costs and a big pool of young, English-speaking lawyers, outsourcing firms charge from one-tenth to one-third what a Western law firm bills an hour."

• "The number of legal outsourcing companies has more than tripled in the last five years."

• "Revenue at India’s legal outsourcing firms is expected to grow to $440 million this year, up 38 percent from 2008, and should surpass $1 billion by 2014."

• “It really is the future of legal services,” says Leah Cooper, former managing lawyer for mining giant RioTinto and current director of legal outsourcing for CPA Global.

Support For Solo Practitioners

Last week the ABA rolled out new online support for solo practitioners. They tout their new Smart Soloing Center as "an online resource that is the latest in its growing portfolio of products and services designed for sole practitioners."

The Smart Soloing Center includes:

The Solo Blog Network, featuring posts from some of the most insightful lawyers who are writing about the joys and challenges of solo practice.

• Articles drawn from the ABA’s dozens of substantive law magazines.

• The most popular discussions from SoloSez, the ABA’s free e-mail discussion list for solo practitioners.

• The latest news about solos and small firms from the daily feed of the ABA Journal.

• Links to a wide variety of websites for solos.

ABA President Carolyn Lamm acknowledges that “solos need things other lawyers don’t."

Here at LegalEase, we are also keenly aware that solo practitioners have their own set of needs. Which is why we offer legal support services like document/contract review, deposition summaries, and legal research/writing .

Our legal support is scalable, allowing solo practitioners to navigate heavy loads as well as giving solos the opportunity to accept larger cases they would otherwise have to refer elsewhere.

And our cost structure is designed to be the most efficient alternative for solo practitioners. But don't just take our word for it; read what others have to say.