http://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/2009/04/nine_legal_technology_trends_for_2009_the_yea.html
Trend #7 is what caught my eye: "E-discovery in still waters."
Mr. Kennedy rightfully notes that that law firms have "successfully resisted wide-scale changes to business as usual litigation." He also correctly points out that there are deeper trends that will prevent firms from resisting change in the long term. He cites a number of trends that he and others have been discussing for a while, including a growing emphasis on cooperation and collaboration, adoption of new tools and techniques to better handle massive amounts of data, and increased commoditization of many e-discovery services.
I found one observation he makes hits particularly close to home:
The main trend you will want to take notice of is one that started a few years ago and has continued to grow. It's the movement of the lawyers who know the most and who are the best at EDD out of law firms and into the employ of EDD service providers. This really is a tectonic shift with the probable long-term result of EDD service providers largely taking this work away from law firms and EDD, perhaps, no longer even considered part of the ordinary practice of law, leaving litigation lawyers to redefine what they actually do as clients route around them to the EDD service providers who have all of the talent. I invite you to give that some serious thought.
It was only a few years ago when the trend everyone was talking about was that e-discovery lawyers were coming out of the cold and finally being embraced in law firms and corporate legal departments. It used to be the case that lawyers with a technological bent, who focused on electronic discovery, generally did best working for e-discovery vendors. Focusing on e-discovery certainly was not a way to get ontp the partnership track of at most law firms. As for in-house positions, almost everything related to e-discovery was outsourced and most corporate legal departments were happy to let outside counsel drive the process and select the vendors.
About five years ago I started to see that change. If Dennis Kennedy is correct. This was a short-lived trend and those e-discovery lawyers are going to hightail it back to specialized e-discovery service vendors. I agree with him.
While opportunities at law firms and corporations have increased in recent years for e-discovery experts, the fact is that the real career growth is with e-discovery service providers. This includes not only the traditional imaging/hosting/computer forensics/consulting firms like First Advantage, Kroll Ontrack, and Case Central (to randomly pick a few); but increasingly legal staffing agencies and legal process outsourcing companies ("LPOs") are hiring e-discovery experts.
I think that we will also see a further consolidation among the litigation support bureaus, legal staffing agencies, and LPOs. This has been happening for some time, but it will continue and you'll see more litigation support bureaus acting like or buying up LPOs and LPOs and staffing agencies buying each other.
Getting back to Mr. Kennedy's post, I could not help but to crack a smile when I read his advice for what lawyers should do in response to this trend. He writes:
What to Do: Watch the developments. Keep up with industry developments by reading some of the excellent EDD blogs. Watch the flow of talent out of law firms. There are still plenty of opportunities for lawyers in EDD, but I suggest looking for niche areas of EDD that you can do well or new roles, like project management. If I were a litigator involved in EDD, I'd look for one EDD niche to become very good at in 2009.
[Emphasis added.]
I couldn't agree with him more. There is a lot of creative destruction and re-creation happening in the e-discovery services industry, which will create opportunties for those lawyers and litigation support professionals who can think beyond "business as usual." Project management experience is incredibly valuable in the current environment and better understood by new breed of service providers who'll be major employers of e-discovery talent.
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