Contract Attorneys

Document Review Monkey Calls For Task Force To Fix Everything. How Cute.

Breaking News: The Job Market Sucks!

By  
on

Breaking news! This just in: lawyers laid off during the 2008 economic downturn agree in finding the job market difficult. Well… no s**t bro.

The January edition of the Journal of the Missouri Bar has a piece by an anonymous document review attorney containing, “A Call for a Bar Task Force to Address the Lawyer Underemployment Problem.” While I have a great deal of skepticism that a study by a state bar has any potential to change the reality of the document review market, or the lives of those of us stuck in the field, the article does accurately portray the helplessness familiar to those trapped with fewer job opportunities (and in a much lower tax bracket) making ends meet as a contract/document review attorney.

By my own rough count, over the past three years, I have been laid off twice for purely economic reasons, applied for over 450 attorney positions, attended only five interviews as a result of those 450 job applications, and obtained only one full-time regular lawyer position through networking as opposed to the normal legal job application process.

Eerie. Many people went to law school hoping to grab the brass ring of job opportunity — and for a brief moment some people even got it — this article captures the grim reality and sense of futility shared by the rest. If anything, this article undersells the scope of the problem.

I observe that the document review work force consists primarily of three groups of lawyers: (1) lawyers at or near retirement age who are relatively financially secure and who are primarily seeking to postpone their retirement (at least in part to obtain higher benefits upon retirement);

I don’t know about this. In my experience the older attorneys stuck doing doc review aren’t just “seeking to postpone their retirement” but are doing it for the cold, hard benjamins. Maybe their student loans are paid off, but that doesn’t mean their financial picture is all rosy. A year or two of unemployment can rock even careful financial planning, and I find it hard to believe much more than desperation and lack of options forces anyone who had a solid legal career into the underbelly of document review.

(2) lawyers, like me, over the age of 40 who have been laid off during the recession of 2007-2009 and its aftermath, who lack the capital or clients to start their own practice and who have been unable to obtain regular full-time employment despite their experience and efforts to do so; and

Sponsored

This category may describe the author, but there are also plenty of attorneys in their 30s that find themselves in the same predicament. Picture it — Biglaw 2008: a mid-level or senior associate, years away from bringing in their own business, but still a hard worker, diligent at their job. The market crashes and the deals dry up. Junior and service partners have a hard enough time justifying their own salary, so the department jettisons the older [read: more expensive] associates in order to salvage the practice. And that’s how you get people in their 30s with actual legal experience doing document review.

(3) young lawyers or recent law school graduates who similarly have been unable to obtain regular fulltime employment after graduation.

Well, this one is right on the money. And despite falling law school enrollment rates too many people are still graduating without any real opportunity to ever “practice” the law.

The truth is, quite like the rest of late stage capitalism, modern legal practice requires an underclass: throngs of under-employed attorneys to churn through the documents that need to be reviewed. And despite the idealistic, seemingly well-intentioned bent of the article the reality is that efforts to “solve” this problem — such as allowing non-lawyers to complete the review work, off-shoring the review, or using technology-assisted review tools and/or predictive coding to limit the calls made by a review team — actually hurt the hours/pockets of the contract attorneys. While this may not be glamorous work — no one ever goes to law school and says they want to be a document review monkey, but at least it pays the bills.

Sponsored

Alex Rich is a T14 grad and Biglaw refugee who has worked as a contract attorney for the last 7 years… and counting. If you have a story about the underbelly of the legal world known as contract work, email Alex at alexrichesq@gmail.com and be sure to follow Alex on Twitter @AlexRichEsq

Topics