Crab's List

Crab's List Archive

2008-01-01T20:28:00.000-08:00

Future posts on this blog's subject matter will appear at Crablaw Maryland Weekly's new homepage at http://www.crablaw.com/weekly. This site is being preserved as an archive and (hopefully) useful feed.

Thanks very much!

Document Review #9 - General Advice for Law Students Interested in Attorney Document Review

2007-09-03T18:22:00.001-07:00

This is another installment in the Crab Media Document Review series.

Crab Media has gotten increasing numbers of inquiries from law students and recent non-barred law grads on how they can give themselves an edge in document review work, how they can use document review as part of an overall career strategy. To those law students, I offer the following advice, first general then specific.

1) There are many alternatives to the BigLaw associate-to-partner paper chase. Small firm practice, medium-sized-firm practice, solo practice, public employment, in-house counsel positions, work in related industries such as legal publishing, legal journalism, sales or marketing to attorneys, temporary attorney work of all sorts, recruiting, real estate investment or sales, or unrelated industries like glass-blowing and restaurant management are all alternatives. Document review contract work is one of those opportunities. It's your life, not those of your gossiping friends who won't pay your bills or achieve your goals for you. I aim this in particular to younger law students who went from high school to college to law school without professional or academic interruption, i.e. without helpful enrichment or experience.

2) Document review work does not entail glory or professional exposure. Due to the nature of the work, the nature of the clientele and the nature of the professional relationships, you will NEVER see a contract attorney's name in the legal newspapers for hard work done or achievements made. This fact may be a positive or negative fact for you, depending on your values, preferences and goals. See above re: "It's your life."

3) Because of the way that document review works, your grades are less important than your demonstrated competence and professional reliability. Rarely will agencies care what you got in Secured Transactions or Conflicts of Law in a document review. If they do care, they will likely have an associate or staff attorney with high academic marks checking your work behind you anyway, but mostly, the law firms want common sense, tenacity and professional maturity.

4) Document review does not self-evidently lead to anything outside the document review world. Sometimes it might lead to staff attorney positions - higher-level document review positions normally involving direct hire by the law firms for a short or long term - but staff attorney positions are not partner track in any sense whatsoever. Again, this might be an advantage or a disadvantage in your personal calculation.

5) If you know that you definitely want to do document review for a living, I would recommend taking courses in the following subjects if possible:

antitrust
securities regulation
patent/IP law
federal jurisdiction
any advanced courses on complex litigation, evidence or attorney-client privilege/professionalism.
any advanced courses on E-Discovery, Document Production or the like that a few law schools may offer now or in the future.

6) If you know that you want to do document review for a living, pick two additional languages that at least 25 million people speak, and learn them. Suggested languages: German, French, Portuguese, Spanish, in that order, based on time investment, frequency of projects and marginal increase in pay from the effort. If you learn Portuguese first, you are more likely to be able to "bluff" Spanish or learn it quickly after the fact than the other way around.

I would suggest choosing two languages in the same language family, or languages in the family in which you already have proficiency. If you know Spanish, pick a Romance language. Slavic languages, whether in Roman or Cyrillic alphabets, may be good long-term investments as Eastern Europe and Russia grow in economic vitality but in the short-term, learning Bulgarian is not a great investment of time from a strictly business point of view (unless you know Russian or Ukrainian or Serbian, in which cases Bulgarian may be a great cost-benefit choice.) Of the Slavic languages, I would choose Polish before Ukrainian or Russian because Poland is an EU member and has a larger economy than Ukraine, and is probably a quicker study than Russian for an Anglophone.

Learning Japanese for document review does not work very well. The level of cultural nuance is extremely high in Japanese documents, such that a casual student cannot hope to master the language enough to handle an antitrust review. Whether the same is true for Chinese documents, I cannot say. If you know Arabic, you are not likely to find attorney document review work for private firms, but the CIA, FBI, NSA and DHS might LOVE to talk with you.

A good time to learn another language is after you take the Bar but before you get your results. I would suggest taking a class and then buying an advanced grammar and business dictionary to the language maybe a third of the way through, and plowing far ahead of your teacher. A good place to practice speaking the language (not needed for most document reviews but good for getting the study done faster) is hooking up with language "Meet-Ups" in your area. Certifying exams are available for a small fee from various language testing and instruction companies in major cities.

7) If you have a financial background (MBA, Finance degree or the like), you should sharpen your skills and put them loudly on your document review resume, ESPECIALLY if you have forensic accounting experience. Cases involving securities regulation or the like need sharp eyes trained to know the difference between different types of financial statements and what they contain. In addition, such skills are very useful for contract attorney work outside the realm of document review projects.

8) If you know that you want to do document review work in the long term, I would suggest exploring employment with the vendors of the electronic document management packages that law firms use. The major software packages are, among others, Stratify, Attenex, Concordance, EED, Kroll-on-Track, RingTail and Summation. I would suggest doing a search on Google for some or all of these terms to find licensed vendors in your area who service these packages. I particularly recommend this for attorneys who have a technical, IT or programming background. There is more money in the vending part of this business than in attorney document review; the consulting fees charged by some of the vendors per hour are truly shocking, and experience "behind the wall" is of value to agencies and law firms who have to cope with such agencies.

9) Most law schools require at least one major paper as a graduation condition. It may be called a "senior paper," "cert. paper," etc. If you want to, you can right about the law that affects the endangered species status of the bald eagle or same-sex marriage or the like. Worthy topics. But if you want to get an edge, you could do worse than to write about the FRCP changes that accommodate and streamline E-Discovery.

10) If you do decide to do document review, no substitute exists for contact with the relevant market. Accordingly, you should join The Posse List NOW. At the risk of being outrageously immodest, I would suggest bookmarking this site or subscribing to Crab's List's RSS Feed for your Google feed reader or other reader. The more connection you get with the relevant market, the better.

All the best with your pursuit of your career goals, whether within this unusual industry or outside of it.

PROJECT: New Projects with Hudson DC

2007-08-25T08:19:00.000-07:00

From Melanie Rinzel at Hudson Legal DC:

We are staffing several document review projects that require licensed attorneys. The projects are slated to go for 6 to 8 weeks. The projects have two start dates; one project will start Monday, August 27th and the other will start Wednesday, August 29th. If you are looking for a temporary project, this is a great opportunity. If you are interested, please send your resume in MS Word format to temp.recruiters@hudson.com.

PROJECT: HIRECounsel Seeking Document Review Attorneys

2007-08-22T17:29:00.000-07:00

From Tamiko Hubbard of HIRECounsel:

HIRECounsel is currently staffing 2 electronic document review projects starting on Monday, August 27th. The projects will be located on site at the firm in Washington, DC, are expected to last 2 weeks, require 40 hours per week (OT is a possibility) and pay $35/hour. Candidates can be licensed anywhere.

Please send resumes to thubbard@hirecounsel.com

Project with Clutch DC - Contact Now

2007-08-17T15:04:00.001-07:00

I am informed that Clutch Legal in DC is staffing a project immediately. I do not have details but would urge readers to contact Clutch at 202-828-3380 or by email to Pablo Gil de Montes ASAP to learn more. Time is of the essence.

Document Review #7 - An Insider's Guide to Winning the Legal Document Review Job Interview

2007-08-16T15:25:00.001-07:00

Document review job interviews are usually simpler than interviews for most other types of attorney jobs. For a traditional law job in a big firm, you may meet with several different associates, one or several partners, a hiring committee representative and representatives from Human Resources. Just getting to meet everyone can take days, weeks, depending on scheduling. Small and mid-sized firms usually streamline the process a bit but even there, it's a more complex undertaking than with most document review interviews. Document review interviews are about common sense and solving practical needs - the agency's, their clients' and of course yours.

When you get a call from an agency to which you have submitted your resume, the recruiter will typically tell you to bring several forms of ID, your DC Bar Card (if you have one) and an extra copy of your resume. You should ALWAYS bring extra copies of your resume even if your recruiter has already reviewed your resume or even commented on it to you, or doesn't ask for it. A responsible recruiter will print it out your resume and have it for her use but it is up to you to be a responsible applicant. The details of what should be on your resume and how you should lay the content out form the topic of another article in this series. A writing sample is not a bad thing to bring but most agencies don't want one. Some agencies will want a transcript but they will usually be happy to receive it directly from your law school after the fact; in general, they want your transcript to make sure you are not lying or committing a fraud, not so much because they want to see your A- (or C-) in Secured Transactions or Creditors' Rights.

You should also bring forms I-9, W-4 and your state/local income tax withholding form. As I understand it, DC employers are not required by DC law to withhold according to other states' income tax laws for their out-of-state employees but most will do so as a courtesy. You are responsible for income taxes in your own state only on your DC wage/salary income if DC has a wage treaty with that state; DC has wage treaties with Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia and other states (NOT Delaware as of this writing.) Of course, bring the DC withholding form if you live in DC. But bring the forms pre-filled in; you should print ten copies of each filled out-form, typed not handwritten if possible, if you are going on a mass interview spree. Bringing those forms pre-filled (signed on the spot, but pre-filled) saves time and aggravation and will make a very solid impression on your recruiter and her staff.

Business attire - suits - is the rule for the agency interview and for the first day on the job on most projects, after which your supervisor will either tell you to dress down or it will be obvious that you should do so (i.e. when you are the only suit in the building.) But for the interview, dress as if it were a court appearance. Washington (and Baltimore, for that matter) are sartorially conservative but most law firms permit and encourage business casual attire for non-client contact staff to encourage greater comfort during long-haul hours.

If you are used to not paying attention to non-attorney employees, or regarding them with disdain as the "hired help," please stop reading NOW and take your business elsewhere. I don't want my site to be associated with you professionally; you are bad for my business.

If you are still reading, great. Glad that you are still here.

When you arrive at the interview - at least 15 minutes early - greet everyone and endeavor to remember everyone's name. Ask people how to spell and pronounce their names properly if applicable because you want to make sure not to forget or goof their names. Every member of the human race likes his or her name spelled and pronounced correctly, i.e. the way that they do it. This is important because everybody in a small office has the ability to take care of you nicely or to lose your file. Get everyone's business card.

You may notice that the walls of the agency's office might be pretty bare. Many agencies are new entrants into the DC market and decor is a very low priority. The primary purpose of the office is to administer the HR end of project work and to interview you to make sure that you are self-evidently not a lunatic or idiot that will get the agency either embarrassed, sued, dropped or blacklisted. You should not assume that bare walls mean either a fly-by-night agency or a failed agency; bare walls may suggest aggressive new entry into the market by a New York-based agency and a fanatic focus on landing the business, rather than on interior decor.

Once you are settled in, you will have a stack of paper to fill out. Some of it will be I-9, W-4, and state/DC income tax forms which you will have to fill out already filled out! One of the forms will be a badly designed application form. Fill it out, using your resume (that you brought!) to help you get things in proper order. If you are a document review veteran, you should prepare and bring a chart listing the telephone numbers and addresses of all DC contract agencies for which you worked; you can use this one from Crab's List as a partial start.

Once you are done with the paperwork, you will be called into the interview. Greet the interviewer warmly and be a person. If you don't know what "a person" is, consider this source. You need not impress this person aggressively with how much of a genius you are or think you are; being able to listen, exhibit common sense, get along with people and show up on time (which is why you arrived early!) are the key personal assets. Being low key and cooperative is the right tone; if they need you to be Alan Dershowitz, they will tell you that directly. Most recruiters are former practicing attorneys, contract or otherwise, who wanted a different lifestyle or wanted to be in more of a people business than a paper business. One of the best agencies in DC is owned by a successful former associate of a major "BigLaw" player who scratched his entrepreneurial itch and now competes for and wins contracts from that employer and elsewhere.

Do let the interviewer know about special skills that you have - not as cause for bragging but just as assets that the recruiter can deploy to land a placement. While the skills should be on the resume of course, it's important to tell the recruiter that you speak and read German, that you are member of the Patent Bar, that you have EU citizenship or work eligibility (for projects overseas) or a financial background for applicable cases. The resume and application may not get entered into the database in time to "appear" on a search if a project comes in quickly for your skill set. You must tell these skills to your interviewer directly. If you speak a foreign language, you should offer to interview with the agency in that language, though few or none will require that.

The interviewer will typically ask about your availability - when can you start, how many hours are you seeking, will you work mega-overtime, on weekends or in the evening? Be up front but try to show flexibility in this regard, if you can. If you have major commitments coming up (vacation, major or planned absences, academic study or are interviewing aggressively for a permanent position), be up front and open and ask for guidance on how to make your scheduling most convenient to the agency. Ditto with geography; if you cannot take projects that require a car or are in an unusual remote location, say so.

If you know contract attorneys from other projects or from your social acquaintance, drop their names and offer to let your attorney acquaintances know about your new agency. Whether your agency knows that attorney or not, you will show that you are connected - which is a GOOD thing. If you are signed up with other agencies, mention that as well; that is NOT bad form whatsoever, will NOT cause offense or a bad taste and shows that you are looking to be successful in this market. Agencies do compete but mostly regard each other decently; sometimes agencies will split a large project. One law firm with offices in Northern Virginia often staffs large (100+attorney) projects through eight or nine agencies at once.

For all other matters, use common sense. If you don't have common sense, fake it for 15 minutes.

When you leave, thank everyone individually and send thank you notes to every human being you have met. Not thank you emails - that's just another thing to unclog out of the email box - but thank you notes written on paper and addressed with a stamp, hand-written on nice paper. EVERYONE, no exceptions. 1-2 weeks after the interview, send an email to your recruiter thanking her again but asking about opportunities opening up.

Having read this, if you think that this was mostly common sense, you are right - and an attentive reader. Thanks for your interest and good luck!

PROJECT: German Document Review in DC

2007-08-07T21:14:00.000-07:00

Project involves document review through the Delta Group. Rate: $50/hour, benefits available. Details still being worked out but TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE - apply NOW, do not wait if you might be interested. Contact Gabe Acevedo at gacevedo@deltagroup.com for more information about this project and please mention Crab's List!

Jobs Listings for DC/MD Lawyers

2007-08-05T06:40:00.000-07:00

Crab's List provides two sets of job information for the benefit of attorney (and non-attorney) readers.

The first is the feed over at the right marked "HOT DC/MD LAW JOBS." It provides content from the Washington, DC and Baltimore Craig's List legal/paralegal RSS feeds, with some filtering to focus specifically on attorney opportunities. Those feeds update several times a day and you should feel encouraged to check in several times a day.

The second is the set of jobs that will appear from time to time in this blog. Such jobs will be marked with the label "jobs" for your convenience. Individual agencies and other sources forward me tips about such jobs, and I will post some of them here.

Jobs will also be categorized by:

agency name
location (DC, MD, NoVA, NYC, etc.)
expected duration (short= below 90 days, medium 91-180 and long 181+, temp-to-perm, etc.)
hours per week (minimums and maximums, if known)
type of work (doc review, litigation, etc.)
rate of pay (subminimum wage, minimum wage, 35.01-40, 40.01-45, 45.01-50, 50.01+) whether a DC license is required (DC license, MD license, no license)
special skills desired (foreign language, German, Spanish, finance, patent, etc.)

Agencies that have open staffing needs may email me at the "Contact the Crab" link to the upper right. I may be setting up a separate email link in the near future specifically for agencies but my regular contact link is fine for now.

Please do NOT send me any resume, ever. Crab's List is not a placement agency, but simply an independent website. All of the Crab's listings will have contact information for the respective agencies including both email and live phone contact info, and in some cases fax information.

I do not claim to list all available positions or even all such positions that I learn about. Readers should view Crab's List as a useful source to be used with other sources, not THE useful source. Thanks.

CHART OF AGENCIES - BOOKMARK

2007-08-04T08:05:00.000-07:00

Because of Blogger's infamously poor handling of HTML tables, the Agency Chart previously incorporated into the homepage of Crab's List is now located here: http://www.crabslist.crablaw.com/agencies.html

CONSTRUCTION CONTINUING

2007-08-04T07:45:00.000-07:00

Please pardon the mess. You will note some dead links on this page. Repairs, upgrades and new installations will be continuing.

Welcome to the new Crab's List Blog!

2007-08-04T06:40:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the Crab's List Blog! For many months, Crab's List has provided a simple, convenient job data feed for attorneys working in the temporary or contract attorney environments in metropolitan Washington, as well as some basic links and information regarding contacts and the nature of that work.

None of that has changed.

What has changed is location of the data, most of it now here within the crabslist.crablaw.com subdomain. Some of the old Crab's List data such as the chart of local agencies, will stand outside this .index page.

But the biggest change will be this blog itself. I have struggled to find a suitable mechanism other than blog architecture for the delivery of new project notices and similar data from my various formal and informal contacts in this field. I considered learning SQL for the maintenance of a formal database, but my brief look through a SQL textbook from the public library and prior consults with web developers led me to a "Hell No" moment. So Blogger-based blog architecture it is.