alt.legal: Now You Are Speaking My Language
Do you need to conduct document review in a foreign language? This entrepreneur can help.
Sitting in a bar in Atlanta last year, I learned that Jonathan Rossi is living the American Dream.
A son of an immigrant, he worked his way up through various odd jobs, found his way to law school, which delivered on its promise… by presenting him with Japanese foreign-language document review.
But in his story resides the primary jewel of the alt.legal movement: owning all of your experiences and finding new ways to serve the legal industry.
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I got some time with Jonathan to share his story for Above The Law. Hope you find it as inspiring as I did.
Ed Sohn: How did you start your career?
Jonathan Rossi: It’s been a great journey. I’ve cleaned bathrooms as a janitor while my mother raised three children in an unfamiliar country, sold used cars to pay for college tuition, and even wrote speeches for a member of Congress in D.C. This is all part of my career.
Like many readers of Above the Law, I went to law school to become an attorney. I took all the same foundation courses, feverishly studied to impress law firm recruiters, and clerked at the California Court of Appeal. I even completed my final year of legal studies in Tokyo and took a course all in Japanese where I read Japanese legal opinions taught by the former General Counsel of Apple Japan. The irony, however, is the vast majority of my career is built on Civ Pro. Yes, you read it correctly, Civil Procedure.
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I had the luxury to leverage my Japanese language skills reviewing Japanese documents at law firms. Does that sound like fun? Keep reading. This was a blessing and I thank Rule 26 (b) and Rule 34! These rules govern the duty to disclose and the production of electronically stored information during discovery. Sounds awfully boring except I was not looking at these rules cringing at the sight of motions practice; instead I was thinking about the dearth of resources that law firms had when it came down to reviewing documents in Chinese, Japanese or Korean. No company positioned or branded themselves to offer these types of services. Until now.
Today I’m the Founder & CEO of a fast-growing company called The CJK Group with operations in Asia and North America. We specialize in managing and quality-controlling teams of bilingual attorneys that review multi-language documents for the Am Law 100. We get involved when clients need to review and classify multi-language data, mostly in digital form, arising during litigation, internal investigations and transaction based due diligence. My Civ Pro professor would be proud!
ES: What made you start your own company? How is it going?
Jonathan Hiroshi Rossi (via The CJK Group)
JR: Entrepreneurs are problem solvers. So are attorneys, actually. I saw a problem and founded the company to solve that problem.
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In the document review space, the problem was multi-language data. Doc review gets a bad reputation, but when you add foreign language into the corpus, you really need to know what you’re doing. Think about it. The legal team needs to review hundreds of thousands of Japanese and Chinese language documents. The stakes are high and the issues are multi-faceted and subtle. Technology helps but depending on the type of case, there will be large volumes of multi-language digital evidence that need to be classified.
So who do you call? I’ll save you the suspense. Call me!
The way I saw it is that most law firms outsource this task to service providers that specialize in this type of work. Except no company specializes in multi-language document review — trust me, I’ve checked. As an entrepreneur and lover of languages, this was an opportunity. I executed. There was a deficit in the market and I filled that gap. I went from reviewing Japanese-language documents at a law firm to managing large teams of multi-language professionals all over Asia and North America. We’ve done well, but there is still a lot more to do. Stay tuned.
ES: What are you learning about Asian language review? What are the trends in this space?
JR: I was raised multi-cultural and multi-lingual. My father spoke five languages and I grew up speaking three. Languages are complex, to say the least. Asian language review, in particular, is unlike English review in so many ways. Those who speak more than one language understand the challenges that arise when trying to explain even a single word to somebody who does not speak that language. In the context of an investigation or a complex legal dispute, the nuances found in written and spoken Japanese or Chinese can detrimentally impact the case. In addition to this, the duty to ensure your client’s data is safeguarded and not inadvertently produced remain the same. No matter what language, it does not absolve our duty to review documents accurately, especially for attorney-client privilege, trade secrets and PII.
With respect to trends, I’d like to view this from two places of interest. At the macro-level there’s a great deal of consolidation in the space. Some would argue this actually leads to inferior results in the service that is provided. We can discuss this another time. At the micro-level, my belief is that law firms and corporate legal departments demand specialization. In other words, clients are becoming more sophisticated buyers of legal support services. They know that if they want the best of breed, they will need to go a la carte.
ES: What’s one piece of advice you would give to young attorneys that see a business opportunity?
JR: In the opening paragraph of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, he says it best: “Always vaguely planning and never taking off.” Find a problem or pain point and provide a solution that the market is willing to pay for. It’s an iterative process. If you think about it, we’re creative and limitless. Just go and do it. You don’t need an MBA or even a JD, just the courage and the passion to dream big.
Ed Sohn is VP, Product Management and Partnerships, for Thomson Reuters Legal Managed Services. After more than five years as a Biglaw litigation associate, Ed spent two years in New Delhi, India, overseeing and innovating legal process outsourcing services in litigation. Ed now focuses on delivering new e-discovery solutions with technology managed services. You can contact Ed about ediscovery, legal managed services, expat living in India, theology, chess, ST:TNG, or the Chicago Bulls at edward.sohn@thomsonreuters.com or via Twitter (@edsohn80). (The views expressed in his columns are his own and do not reflect those of his employer, Thomson Reuters.)
Sitting in a bar in Atlanta last year, I learned that Jonathan Rossi is living the American Dream.
A son of an immigrant, he worked his way up through various odd jobs, found his way to law school, which delivered on its promise… by presenting him with Japanese foreign-language document review.
But in his story resides the primary jewel of the alt.legal movement: owning all of your experiences and finding new ways to serve the legal industry.
I got some time with Jonathan to share his story for Above The Law. Hope you find it as inspiring as I did.
Ed Sohn: How did you start your career?
Jonathan Rossi: It’s been a great journey. I’ve cleaned bathrooms as a janitor while my mother raised three children in an unfamiliar country, sold used cars to pay for college tuition, and even wrote speeches for a member of Congress in D.C. This is all part of my career.
Like many readers of Above the Law, I went to law school to become an attorney. I took all the same foundation courses, feverishly studied to impress law firm recruiters, and clerked at the California Court of Appeal. I even completed my final year of legal studies in Tokyo and took a course all in Japanese where I read Japanese legal opinions taught by the former General Counsel of Apple Japan. The irony, however, is the vast majority of my career is built on Civ Pro. Yes, you read it correctly, Civil Procedure.
I had the luxury to leverage my Japanese language skills reviewing Japanese documents at law firms. Does that sound like fun? Keep reading. This was a blessing and I thank Rule 26 (b) and Rule 34! These rules govern the duty to disclose and the production of electronically stored information during discovery. Sounds awfully boring except I was not looking at these rules cringing at the sight of motions practice; instead I was thinking about the dearth of resources that law firms had when it came down to reviewing documents in Chinese, Japanese or Korean. No company positioned or branded themselves to offer these types of services. Until now.
Today I’m the Founder & CEO of a fast-growing company called The CJK Group with operations in Asia and North America. We specialize in managing and quality-controlling teams of bilingual attorneys that review multi-language documents for the Am Law 100. We get involved when clients need to review and classify multi-language data, mostly in digital form, arising during litigation, internal investigations and transaction based due diligence. My Civ Pro professor would be proud!
Jonathan Hiroshi Rossi (via The CJK Group)
ES: What made you start your own company? How is it going?
JR: Entrepreneurs are problem solvers. So are attorneys, actually. I saw a problem and founded the company to solve that problem.
In the document review space, the problem was multi-language data. Doc review gets a bad reputation, but when you add foreign language into the corpus, you really need to know what you’re doing. Think about it. The legal team needs to review hundreds of thousands of Japanese and Chinese language documents. The stakes are high and the issues are multi-faceted and subtle. Technology helps but depending on the type of case, there will be large volumes of multi-language digital evidence that need to be classified.
So who do you call? I’ll save you the suspense. Call me!
The way I saw it is that most law firms outsource this task to service providers that specialize in this type of work. Except no company specializes in multi-language document review — trust me, I’ve checked. As an entrepreneur and lover of languages, this was an opportunity. I executed. There was a deficit in the market and I filled that gap. I went from reviewing Japanese-language documents at a law firm to managing large teams of multi-language professionals all over Asia and North America. We’ve done well, but there is still a lot more to do. Stay tuned.
ES: What are you learning about Asian language review? What are the trends in this space?
JR: I was raised multi-cultural and multi-lingual. My father spoke five languages and I grew up speaking three. Languages are complex, to say the least. Asian language review, in particular, is unlike English review in so many ways. Those who speak more than one language understand the challenges that arise when trying to explain even a single word to somebody who does not speak that language. In the context of an investigation or a complex legal dispute, the nuances found in written and spoken Japanese or Chinese can detrimentally impact the case. In addition to this, the duty to ensure your client’s data is safeguarded and not inadvertently produced remain the same. No matter what language, it does not absolve our duty to review documents accurately, especially for attorney-client privilege, trade secrets and PII.
With respect to trends, I’d like to view this from two places of interest. At the macro-level there’s a great deal of consolidation in the space. Some would argue this actually leads to inferior results in the service that is provided. We can discuss this another time. At the micro-level, my belief is that law firms and corporate legal departments demand specialization. In other words, clients are becoming more sophisticated buyers of legal support services. They know that if they want the best of breed, they will need to go a la carte.
ES: What’s one piece of advice you would give to young attorneys that see a business opportunity?
JR: In the opening paragraph of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, he says it best: “Always vaguely planning and never taking off.” Find a problem or pain point and provide a solution that the market is willing to pay for. It’s an iterative process. If you think about it, we’re creative and limitless. Just go and do it. You don’t need an MBA or even a JD, just the courage and the passion to dream big.
Ed Sohn is VP, Product Management and Partnerships, for Thomson Reuters Legal Managed Services. After more than five years as a Biglaw litigation associate, Ed spent two years in New Delhi, India, overseeing and innovating legal process outsourcing services in litigation. Ed now focuses on delivering new e-discovery solutions with technology managed services. You can contact Ed about ediscovery, legal managed services, expat living in India, theology, chess, ST:TNG, or the Chicago Bulls at edward.sohn@thomsonreuters.com or via Twitter (@edsohn80). (The views expressed in his columns are his own and do not reflect those of his employer, Thomson Reuters.)
