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sk any corporate general counseltoday about his or her top concern,and the answer almost invariably will be “cost control.” In a recent Fulbright& Jaworski client study, the firm’s Second Annual Litigation Trends Survey Findings,cost was the most-cited concern.Interestingly, some respondents expressedmore concern over the costs of litigationthan whether they won or lost the case.Discovery costs continue to spiral upwardbecause of the vast amount of electronicdata created daily, and the need for robusttechnology to reduce document sets forreview, coupled with high-quality/low-costreview, is acute.But the greatest success for clients, asmeasured by cases won and costs saved, will be realized by combining robusttechnology with lower-cost, offshore legal workers. In a recent KPMG white paper, ARevolution in E-Discovery: the PersuasiveEconomics of the Document Analytic Approach, four different methodologies forpre-paring and reviewing documents inlitigation were compared. While a broadrange of total costs was computed acrossthe different approaches, the majority of the cost in all cases was in first-leveldocument review — ranging from 58% to90%. So the cost and time are not in theprocessing and production of documents,but within the review.
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The evolution of skills and services inlitigation support will continue to parallelthat of other global industries. Contractmanufacturing — a more mature outsourcedindustry — can be studied for parallels, andperhaps provide hints of legal outsourcing’sfuture. In that industry, early servicecompanies put electrical components intocircuit boards and delivered them back toclients, such as IBM.Over time, those service providers beganto purchase the components for assembly themselves — known as “turnkey services.” They also developed skills in scheduling their factories, organizing sophisticatedprocurement operations strategically locatedaround the globe to obtain better pricesthan their clients, and adding value by designing lighter and cheaper componentsand finished products. These early serviceproviders were instrumental in setting upfactories in geographic areas where skilled,low-cost and high work-ethic labor isavailable. They developed such expertiseover just two decades that majorcorporations eagerly sold their operations with “take-or-pay” contracts to theseservice providers. When studying the contract-manufacturing industry, a clearly observable trend from“out-tasking” to “outsourcing”emerges; thatis to say, there has been a shift from work provided in an assembly-line setting toactually setting up the infrastructure andorganization to deliver those services tomultiple clients, and to enhance theservices — including cost-saving anddeveloping greater expertise. With regard to supplemental legalservices, basic offshore bibliographic legalcoding started around 10-15 years ago, andis now widely accepted as a much better value for the money than its domesticcounterpart, provided that care is taken with vendor selection. This line of developmentalso parallels the contract-manufacturing industry, where unsophisticated andlower-value manufacturing components were outsourced for assembly first.Drawing a comparison with document-review services, current U.S. practices makeit common for law firms to use teams of contract attorneys (occasionally paralegals)on an as-needed basis for said services. These teams are routinely being formedand disbanded with each case, often resulting in a constant “train-and-retrain” and“hire-and-rehire” method, which can wastetime, money and resources. There’s noreason why this “churn” can’t be avoided by using service providers who specialize inthese services. As such, our research andexperience dictates that much like otherlegal services, the adoption rate for using offshore attorneys for first-level documentreview will significantly increase due to thefollowing drivers:• Huge cost-savings over domestic re-view. Top Indian attorneys cost less than half what very junior domestic-review attorneys and paralegals cost;• Higher client comfort level with off-shore work, because quality and service have vastly improved over the years;• Existing infrastructure. Offshore managementexpertise, coupled with high-bandwidth,low-cost and ubi-quitous data networks,
First-Level Review: The Next Legal Service to Be Sent Offshore?
By Priya Keshav and Mike Dolan
Priya Keshav
is CTO of Tusker Group,a litigation-support company helping legal professionals review electronicand paper documents. She has many years of experience helping clients wintheir cases while leveraging technology to control costs. Contact her atpkeshav@tuskergroup.com or 281-759-5336.
Mike Dolan
is CEO of Tusker Groupand has decades of experience building and running “value-for-money” operationsaround the globe, as well asleading domestic operations for majormultinational corporations. Contact him atmdolan@tuskergroup.com or 512-499-8660.
Volume 3, Number 4 • August 2006
e-Discovery e-Discovery
LAW &STRATEGY LAW &STRATEGY
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