6 July 2010 — There is an interesting article in today’s The Legal Intelligencer about the increasing use of using “project attorneys” and “contract attorneys” to handle an increased workload on shrinking budgets. Bringing on specialized, experienced attorneys for six months to a year to handle one set project in their area of expertise has become the solution...

...This is the trend we recently posted about and that we have reported on extensively in the past year and that we discussed in detail at the Georgetown Law conference “Law Firm Evolution”. It is what pundits in the industry call the “decomposition of legal tasks” into component parts that can be delegated to various sources — in-sourcing, relocating, offshoring, outsourcing, subcontracting — and it has had its biggest effect on contract attorneys who are a large part of our membership base. But the trend is substantive legal work and not the highly structured/repetitive functions such as document review, research tasks and processing that most contract/project attorneys fit into.

Please see full article below for more information.