Where is the contract attorney market headed ?
The Posse List, a seven year old association of contract attorneys has an interesting perspective on where the markets are heading in these difficult times. This interaction provides an insight into how the legal market will evolve in the coming times. Extrapolating these observations we can also comment on the opportunities which are developing in the legal market. Our opinion is that this will be the greatest value from the posse list interviews. Below, we quote from their website and comment on a few of them.
Foreign Corrupt Practices Act , an act passed in ‘77 will be responsible for most of the litigation these days, as Department of Justice in increasing its prosecution under FCPA. Baker & Mckenzie and Kirkland & Ellis, which have strong FCPA practices will benefit in these prosecutions. As a consequence there will be a lot of foreign language document review projects.
At least 120 companies are under investigation according to Mark Mendelsohn, a deputy chief in the DOJ division overseeing the prosecutions. Lucent technologies and Siemens have paid a heavy fine in the recent past under FCPA.
As a consequence of these and the recent sub prime crisis, corporations and law firms are more aware of risk , and the probable consequences. We expect a lot of opportunity here, when the firms need to assess risk and quantify their exposure to the risk in terms of upsides and downsides.
It makes much more sense to have the e-discovery companies also handle the “back end” — the review itself — since the evolution of the technology makes it a natural progression.
Another space to watch out in the future is computer forensics, an area of growth for contract attorneys with a tech bend. Data recovery, computer forensics and e-discovery all deal with data, and specifically digital data.
Finally, though there is sufficient awareness about Legal Process outsourcing. Today, this accounts for about 4% of total legal spend. In future this is expected to rise.
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