Have license will travel--

By Phillip Bantz Dolan Media Newswires RALEIGH, NC -- They might not be fleeing dust-smothered farmland in rusty jalopies, limping down dirt roads in search of the next odd job, but a growing subculture of lawyers across the country is living out a modern-day "Grapes of Wrath" scenario. Instead of heading west to find fruit-picking work, these lawyers are scouring the land for document review projects. Not all have hungry children in tow, but many stand in the shadows of six-figure law school loans. Document review lawyers move from one job to the next like migrant workers. Most places require them to have a law license, though it doesn't have to be issued by the state where they happen to be working. Not knowing how long the job will last, they live out of suitcases, bouncing from city to city and sleeping in strange beds. Gathered in large offices with fluorescent lighting, they sit in front of computer screens, hands on the mouse, sifting through court documents and decisions trying to determine if the files have any relevance to pending litigation, regulatory requests or internal company investigations. Some document reviewers do this for more than 60 hours a week without getting overtime. Pay is typically a flat hourly wage and compensation depends on location. In Charlotte, the average hourly wage is $25, while doc reviewers get about $17 an hour in Columbia. S.C. A first-year associate at an average-sized firm would be paid four or five times that amount. "When you go to law school, this is not what you think you're going to be doing, pointing and clicking on a mouse. I really didn't even know this existed when I started law school," says a recent graduate of a first-tier law school who traveled hundreds of miles for a doc review project in Charlotte. The young lawyer requested anonymity because he signed a confidentiality agreement with the firm that hired him. A newcomer to the doc review world, he joked with a co-worker about sleeping in his car to save money while others working on the project slept at extended-stay hotels. He ended up booking a room at a down-market motel. "It was rough," he says. "You can't make any money if you stay at a nice hotel while you're working. But the problem is you don't know the city you're in so you have to be careful. I would have been better off if I just committed to an extended-stay (hotel) for the week." Business is booming The rapid growth of the document review industry is tied to several factors, including the switch from paper to electronic filing, and law schools pumping out waves of lawyers while the economy founders and jobs vanish. "The timing in our markets has been a bit fortuitous," says John W. Lassiter, president of Carolina Legal Staffing, which has offices in Charlotte, Raleigh, Columbia, S.C., and Greenville, S.C. He says the Carolinas are quickly becoming a hub for the document review industry. The reason is simple: "It's less expensive to run document review operations in North and South Carolina than New York or Chicago or California," Lassiter says. Document reviewers are paid an average of $5 to $10 more an hour in New York City than in Charlotte, according to Lauren S. Rothenberg, senior vice president of Hudson Legal, a national staffing agency based in Manhattan. But the burgeoning doc review industry is facing increased scrutiny. Some firms and third-party staffing agencies now limit the number of hours that reviewers can work. Meanwhile, a legal malpractice lawsuit on the other side of the country threatens to expand the scope of liability that reviewers and the firms that hire them face. The suit pending in a California federal court alleges that international law firm McDermott Will & Emery failed to vet the work of its contract doc reviewers. As a result, thousands of privileged documents in a whistleblower suit were inadvertently sent to the government, and subsequently ended up in the hands of opposing counsel. Keith W. Vaughan, chairman of Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice in Winston-Salem, says his firm considers contract lawyers to be employees of the firm, however temporary their position, and would stand behind them if a client was unhappy with an aspect of the doc review work and sued. Content for now Unemployed law school grads are not the only ones relegated to document review work. Seasoned attorneys who lost lucrative jobs at big firms in the midst of the financial meltdown have also turned to doc review to make ends meet. "We saw a lot of folks coming out of sophisticated practices, wanting to do something as they figured out what they wanted to do in the long-term," says Lassiter, the staffing agency president. "For us, the average full-time document reviewer can make in the range of $60,000-plus a year and it can be a pretty manageable work schedule." Bradford Andrews fits into another category of document reviewers. He left a firm in Florence last year and hung up a shingle in Charleston. He ended up doing doc review work while developing clients at his own practice, bringing home less than $20 an hour on his first job, which involved in-state pharmaceutical patent litigation. Since then, he has joined another doc review project. Among her itinerant colleagues, Eyrika L. Parker is known as a "lifer." She started doing doc review back in 2006, when the job called for poring over hard copies, actual paper, rather than staring at a monitor. She recalls working on a project with two lawyers. Now it's more common to walk into a room filled with dozens of fellow doc reviewers. "When I first started I saw more young lawyers and minorities. It was predominately female-based," she adds. "Now I see older attorneys and I've seen more of the white male than I ever did back in '06." Parker lives in Atlanta, where she hopes to get her Georgia law license and build a bankruptcy practice. But she was recently in Columbia, S.C., for a doc review project. She also works in Alabama, Georgia and North Carolina. She appreciates the fact that document review offices are often open seven days a week, sometimes 24 hours a day. "You can work as long and as much as you want. Normally, I try to get 50 hours under my belt," she says. "I really like having the availability to slip in and slip out. Like any situation, it's all in what you make of it" But she adds, "I definitely have plans to do something else." Entire contents copyrighted © 2011 by Dolan Media Company. Published: Mon, Oct 24, 2011