Litigation Support Jobs Are Leaving Law Firms

There is a growing trend in the eDiscovery world that has law firm jobs moving to vendors and staffing agencies. The reduction in salary costs drives up firm profits because the costs of the support staff handling the processing and management of eDiscovery and Review projects are passed alon the vendor\’s payroll.  The law firm\’s clients ultimately foot the bill for costs incurred by vendors. This trend will create more permanent Project Management & Coordinator roles at legal vendors, and will also create more opportunity for staffing firms hired to bring in contractors to augment the permanent staff during peak periods for collection, processing, production, and review.

We have seen Litigation Support & eDiscovery vendors offer staffing services for document review for many years now, but now we are starting to see Staffing Agencies acquire eDiscovery providers! We have already seen eDiscovery vendors providing a limited amount of general legal staffing services for their document review clients.  Is this going to be the wave of the future, or are more lit support providers going to increase their presence in the staffing segment?    Adecco, one of the largest staffing firms in the world, has recently purchased eDiscovery provider D4 to incorporate into its legal arm called Special Counsel. Should we expect to see Robert Half Legal making a similar acquisition in 2017? Chances are we will see eDiscovery vendors become more involved in staffing, such as DTI’s “Legal Administrative” staffing group, or Consilio’s Document Review group.

The fact remains: these jobs are moving out of the law firm and into the vendor world.

We expect to see law firms continue to trim litigation support roles along with a simultaneous increase in the number of those same types of permanent positions at ligation support vendors. The demand for well qualified contractors working large scale projects will continue to grow whether they are employed by legal vendors or traditional staffing agencies.

About LSC’s Executive Recruiting Group:

We are currently searching for experienced eDiscovery professionals worldwide for several legal vendors and consulting firms based in the US as well as Asia. If your company needs assistance sourcing the right full time/permanent candidates, please contact me at David@LitigationSupportCareers.com for a recruiting solution that will best suit your budget.

David A. Netzer

Executive Recruiter

Litigation Support Careers Inc.

954-767-6428