Don't get me wrong

I am not arguing against market forces. I am lamenting their negative impact on me at the moment. Nonetheless, I see no need to adjust my principles to suit my current situation. Market forces aren't working in my favor? Fine, find another market. Currently, I am looking into moving into the catering business. I think I probably am a better cook than a lawyer, anyway. My point is, even if I stay in Temp Town, I am not in favor of regulation or government intervention in some other way to make the market more favorable to me. Government fucking with markets is always, always wrong. It distorts markets and makes things more expensive for everyone. I am not interested in that, even if, for instance, it were to help me find temp jobs with high pay or overtime. Principles matter. If you're willing to give up what you believe for a little money, you don't really believe anything, do you?

The swordfish is looking a little peaked -- definitely unwell

I've fallen back on the swordfish metaphor lately in referring to this project. The fish is wearing down. We worked Friday, but it was on the two-hour (actually four-hour) delay, so with the early closing recently imposed for Fridays, we only got in a max of seven hours. It sucked, but at least they were all overtime hours for me, having loaded the front end of the week with max hours, knowing the snow was coming.

But the real news Friday was that the paralegals -- also temps, as they got rid of any firm-employed paralegals as soon as the sale closed on our original client company -- got cut to 40 hours a week right after the sale closed. Nobody knew this before -- except the paralegals, of course. Since they won't  want the attorneys working without paralegal support, I think this pretty much guarantees that we'll be cut to 40 hours soon. Probably not next week, because the President's Day holiday cuts our hours anyway, but almost certainly the week after. I hope to be wrong, since the market sucks and I'm not sure I can even find an overtime project elsewhere, anyway. There just aren't that many of them these days. Leaves me wondering: how long before 40 hours pushes me into bankruptcy? The over-under is 6 months. Exit strategy is in the works.

TNR writer sticks to his guns: Big Law is dying

There seems to be a battle between former New Republic writers now working for the Washington Post and current New Republic writers who believe that Big Law is on the ropes. Look here and  here for earlier posts, but basically TNR's Noam Scheiber -- not a name known to me -- contends that Big Law's business model is dead and almost none of the major firms that have relied on that model for decades will continue to do so. Nor will the big firms bounce back:

This is why, to move to the third objection, it doesn’t strike me as very plausible that the industry will simply bounce back the way it has after previous recessions. The world I describe in the piece is basically the world the legal profession has been drifting toward for two decades.* In fact, there are good reasons to think the trajectory has taken a turn for the worse lately—that the legal profession won’t even grow at the same rate as the economy. For example, legal expenses didn't used to be a big enough share of a corporation’s bottom line to be worth vetting very closely, which encouraged firms to pad their bills. Now, according to The Wall Street Journal, clients are using sophisticated legal software to do the job for them, allowing them to effortlessly flag all sorts of dubious charges. That can’t be good for big law firms.

Scheiber's view that the practice of law will change in response to changes in technology and economics -- especially the practice of law on the multi-million dollar corporate scale, where even small efficiency advances can save millions -- shouldn't be shocking. Contract attorneys already are seeing jobs disappear or be shortened by some of the technological changes Scheiber talks about:

Similarly, corporations now have more alternatives to hiring law firms than ever before—like contract attorneys and the “legal process outsourcers” who procure them—and they’re using them increasingly often. Between 2004 and 2010, according to data collected by Bill Henderson of Indiana University, law firm employment dropped by 4 percent, or about 47,000 jobs. During the same period, employment in “all other legal services” (like outsourcers) increased by 50%, or about 8,000 jobs. Obviously, some of that change was driven by the pinch of the recession. But it’s hard to imagine clients reversing these trends as the economy recovers. Recent history suggests that outsourced jobs tend to stay outsourced, whatever the original reason for the move.

All in all, I think it trends out as bad news for everybody thinking about spending -- or who already spent -- lots of money on a law degree. The Big Law jobs are going away, and the new, efficiency- and technology-based model is going to provide more contract attorney jobs, but not necessarily with the kind of hours and rates that used to make contract work attractive, to the extent anything did.  How's that exit strategy coming?

Hat tip to Instapundit for this article.

Another data point in a long string of not-good developments for Temp Town

I've talked about computer-assisted review and predictive coding here and here. Probably elsewhere, too, but I'm lazy. Anyway, it's not good for the future of temps. Likewise, using attorneys in India and the Philippines, among other places, or even just lower-cost states like North Carolina, Ohio and West Virginia, also cannot be good news for DC-based temps. The proliferation of short, 40-hour projects is a direct result of the cost-cutting trends that birthed these developments. Now we're seeing other indications that the future is here, and it sucks, as shown by this post at the Temp Town job listserve The Posse List:

[An agency I work for from time to time] is staffing a JD document review looking to start 5/28/13. Please see the details below: 
*Only a JD required. The client has indicated candidates do not need barred or bar pending *Start date: 5/28/13 *Pay rate: $24/hr plus 1.5 for OT *Hours: 40/hrs week *Duration: 2 weeks 

Short, no OT and no bar required, and so shitty pay as a result -- as in a 20 percent cut from the more or less standard rate.   We've seen the occasional JD-only  project before, so this isn't a totally new development. I will be watching to see if it becomes more of a trend, however.  On the one hand, there is a June 2005 advisory opinion by the DC Court of Appeals Committee on Unauthorized Practice of Law that says “when a person is hired and billed as a lawyer . . . . When a client is paying for the services of a lawyer, and not a paralegal or law clerk, the person providing the services and the person’s employer must comply" with local rules requiring DC Bar membership for the practice of law in the District. (Sorry, no link -- I mentioned I'm lazy, right?) On the other hand, it's just an advisory opinion and won't stop clients from eyeballing that nice little 20 percent savings on labor. The Posse List post says straight up the client made the JD-only call. Think more of them won't? I won't bet against it.

How's that exit strategy coming?

This ought to scare you

Does it seem like I am trying to scare temps into leaving Temp Town for other, greener pastures? There's a reason for that. I am. It's "Amityville Horror" time, people: get out.

Why do I say this (other than the fact that the industry is dying around us)? Try this one on: there is an agency in town that is

currently recruiting college graduates for a document review project starting on Wednesday, March 27th or Thursday, March 28th in Washington, DC. 
* Location -- Downtown Washington, DC 
* Pay Rate -- $21/hr 
* Duration - 2-3 weeks 
* Hours -- 40 hours per week 

Set aside the short duration and no overtime. Ignore, if you can, the ludicrously low pay. Please note the part I put in bold and italics: currently recruiting college graduates. Anybody scared by that? Maybe this isn't a legal review (possible). Maybe the client only cares if a single word appears in a document, and so no legal judgment is required (also possible, and even scarier, since that describes a lot of projects). The point is, an animal never before seen in nature -- a document review that requires no law degree -- has been spotted. We're fucked.

How's that exit strategy coming? Might want to pick up the pace

Apparently the Washington Post thinks that Obamacare will be a boon for temp agencies. The thinking is that, since the law requires employers to offer health insurance only if they have 50 or more full-time equivalent employees (full time is 30 hours a week under Obamacare; if you have 100 employees working 15 hours a week, that is 50 full-time equivalents, or FTEs, and you're on the hook), and employees hired through temp agencies don't technically count as employees of the company for which the work is actually performed, then companies will be encouraged to hire employees through temp agencies if that will keep them under the 50 FTE threshold.  Even for companies that have more than 50 FTEs working for them, hiring through temp agencies will enable companies to avoid having to buy insurance for those employees. Or, in the alternative, they won't have to pay the penalty (sorry, tax) on those employees should the company choose not to buy them health insurance.

The Post seems to think that temp agencies will be able to avoid paying for health insurance (or the penalties -- sorry, tax -- for not buying health insurance) for employees because of IRS regulations. Says the Post:

But in regulations issued last year, the IRS left an opening for employers of “variable-hour” labor such as temp agencies. If it’s not clear upon hiring that an employee will consistently work more than 30 hours weekly, companies get up to 12 months to determine whether the person is full time and qualifies for health benefits — even if the employee does end up working full time. Few temps last 12 months.

The Post is clearly delusional. Sure, Manpower, Kelly, Robert Half and God knows who else probably will benefit from that in most situations. They provide, mainly, temporary workers in non-professional, very temporary situations, often as little as a day or two. But the question as it relates to the temp-lawyer industry becomes not whether we will be around on a given project for more than 12 months -- usually, we won't -- but whether we can reasonably be expected to work at least 30 hours a week during the project. I don't think the agencies can reasonably claim that given the IRS regulations:

Determining Full-Time Employees for Purposes of Shared Responsibility for Employers
Regarding Health Coverage (§ 4980H)
Notice 2012-58
I. PURPOSE AND OVERVIEW
 This notice describes safe harbor methods that employers may use (but are not
required to use) to determine which employees are treated as full-time employees for
purposes of the shared employer responsibility provisions of § 4980H of the Internal
Revenue Code (Code). Specifically, the administrative guidance in this notice,
modifying and expanding on previous guidance, includes a safe harbor method that
employers may apply to specified newly-hired employees.
 As described more fully below, this notice –
• Expands the safe harbor method described in a previous notice to provide
employers the option to use a look-back measurement period of up to 12 months
to determine whether new variable hour employees or seasonal employees are
full-time employees, without being subject to a payment under § 4980H for this
period with respect to those employees. An employee is a variable hour
employee if, based on the facts and circumstances at the date the employee
begins providing services to the employer (the start date), it cannot be
determined that the employee is reasonably expected to work on average at
least 30 hours per week. (The 30 hours per week average reflects the statutory
definition of full-time employee in § 4980H(c)(4) and is the definition of “full-time
employee” as used in this notice.) Seasonal employee is defined in section
III.D.5, below. 

I added the bold and italic emphasis because I don't think that language gives temp agencies the ability to claim we aren't covered under Obamacare. While 40-hour projects are becoming the norm, let's face it: no one, right now, would even respond to a Posse List posting advertising a 29-hour project, no matter what the duration. The law firms always promise at least 40 hours a week. I don't see how temp agencies can take advantage of these regulations and claim the 12-month look-back period. They would have to credibly claim they weren't sure the work would be at least 30 hours a week. They can't claim that if the law firms are always promising at least 40 hours a week. One way or another -- whether firms will only promise 29 hours a week, or whether agencies will claim contract attorneys are suddenly independent contractors, give us 1099 forms and not pay for health insurance or the penalty -- things are going to change in this industry. I am inclined to doubt that the change will be for the better.

Well, this is good news. Not.

OK, just in case this, this, this and   this didn't make you nervous about the future of the practice of law, maybe this article in The Atlantic will:

After decades of killing low-end jobs in retail, software is finally doing the people's bidding by creating a world with fewer lawyers.

In discussing this  article in the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic (the WSJ article is behind a paywall, so go to The Atlantic) did not sound optimistic about the future of the practice of law and, more specifically, Temp Town's piece of the action:

For a while now, attorneys have employed manual keyword searches to sort through the gigabytes of information involved in these case. But as the journal reports, more firms are beginning to use a technology known as "predictive coding," which essentially automates the process at one-tenth the cost. Recently, a magistrate judge in a major Virginia employment discrimination suit ruled that the defense could use predictive coding to sort through their own data, despite objections by the plaintiffs who worried it might not pick up all the relevant documents . . .

 At this point, most temps who have been at this for more than a few weeks have been on a project that used predictive coding at some point, even if they didn't know it. In my opinion, having seen it at work, predictive coding sucks. It simply isn't very good -- yet. It's going to get better, and it is a much bigger threat to us and our livelihood than India or Ohio or Charlotte or any of the other serious and real threats to Temp Town. So, what's your exit strategy?