Since I had been covering a lot of outsourcing news, I thought I would share this funny clip from The Onion.
I am not necessarily opposed to outsourcing itself. That would be hypocritical, considering I used to work for an Indian litigation support company, and currently work for a company that out sources, albeit here in DC, contract attorneys to work in law firms.
That being said I am surprised that the trend to send all our legal work overseas doesn't seem to raise any red flags with our state and national bar organizations on some serious ethical and professional responsibility issues.
Document review is part of discovery which is part of the practice of law. True it is not the most sexy part of the legal process, but it does call upon attorneys to make a judgment call as to a document’s responsiveness, and for that, you need a license.
True, someone without a license could do a fine job of doc reviewing, and it is perfectly ok for a firm to let someone without a license review documents in discovery. However, if that person is not an attorney in a document review, that person must be held to a much higher level of supervision. Attorneys must review their work. Are you telling me that an American firm is going to go back and review 200,000 documents that 20 non-licensed attorneys overseas reviewed, both in the responsive and non-responsive sections. Somehow, I highly doubt it. 200,000 documents in discovery by the way would be extremely small on the scale of many other doc reviews in e-Discovery.
Anyway, enough of my rant. Enjoy the video.
