Better Discovery

I recently posted this response on the LinkedIn ” University of Michigan Law School Alumni” group, on the question of legal outsourcing:

Question :

What are people’s thoughts on legal outsourcing as a way to cut costs for certain routine legal/paralegal tasks such as deposition summaries, document review, broad legal research? Has anyone used such a service? What about using a company with offshore attorneys, e.g. India, Israel, etc.?

My Answer:

Depends on what you mean by “outsourcing.”

As I think about what Agile has to offer the legal profession, the importance of team collocation has become abundantly clear to me. That doesn’t mean that a team should never be ‘distributed,” but it does suggest that lawyers put their teams together with a more coherent strategy than simply buying low and selling high.

Each case needs to have an assessment, completed transparently with the client, on the question of how to create real value for money given the client’s priorities. The folly of doing this without having the team of doc reviewers in on the planning stage never ceases to amaze me.

Right now, my thought is that document review teams should be brought together for the first few days so that they can gel around the mission and standards required for quality. If they need to go away for a few weeks while the rest of the team executes upon their part of the task, that’s fine. But most firms continue to employ the philosophy that doc reviewers are fungible,– a huge disservice to the client.

Only after an internal rhythm is established should the team be disbanded to work remotely. Self-organization is nearly impossible if individuals are spread throughout the world and standards are impossible without some level of human contact.

Yes, cutting cost is important, but it should never be Job 1. Job 1 should always be giving high value for money, with value defined by the client. The gap between cost and perceived value cannot be fixed by simply moving the whole show down on the y-axis.