Litigation Support In a Law Firm – Vendors Are Coming for Your Job

Hidden away in a recently seen blog post about moving to the cloud on Cicayda’s website this week was this little nugget:

There is absolutely no reason to keep hiring internal staff for litigation support when we have the team to help perform all the heavy lifting.

Now, since I work in a law firm now, this clearly got my attention. On the other hand, they’re absolutely correct too. If you work in a firm and your job can be boiled down to processing data, and not much else, why should the firm keep you instead of outsourcing that work? On the other hand, if you are a trusted advisor who helps attorneys with not just processing data, but eDiscovery strategy, searching, analytics, etc., I think there’s a lot to be said for having someone on your own staff who can step in and out of those various roles. Someone the attorneys trust and are comfortable with. Someone they know, and who knows their clients and the problems they typically run into. A vendor supporting dozens of firms doesn’t have the same relationship with attorneys.

So, the choice is yours. If you want to be behind the scenes and just process the data, that’s fine. Just understand that there’s a vendor out there selling your firm management and your IT department on the value of having a cloud based review platform, who also does that kind of work too, without the firm needing to have a full-time employee.

You may want to poke your head out of the data-center every now and then and show off some of those other skills!

Follow these topics: Career, LawFirms, LitigationSupport