Legal Writing & Research

frequently asked questions

COMMON QUESTIONS

• How is Legal Writing & Research organized?
• How do you insure that your contract attorneys are “first rate” at what they do?
• Where do your senior writers, and your contract attorneys, work? Are they all attorneys, or do you farm out portions of your workload to paralegals and secretaries?
• How does your firm successfully compete with other companies who offer the services of much lower-paid attorneys, for example, attorneys who went to school in, and are only licensed to practice in, countries such as India?
• If your outside contract attorneys are of such high quality, why aren’t they out working as practicing lawyers, by themselves or with law firms?
• Is your company also a law firm? Can you or one of your contract attorneys represent me as my attorney?
• What services are you equipped to provide?
• How does Legal Writing & Research assure the maintenance of client confidentiality?
• What are the potential ethical ramifications applicable to legal outsourcing?

ANSWERS

How is Legal Writing & Research organized?

There are essentially two different levels to our business model.

At the in-house level, our staff of Senior Editors is comprised of individuals who each have a minimum of 25 or more years of actually practicing law “down in the trenches.” Each is a graduate of a top-ranked law school who graduated either Summa Cum Laude, Magna Cum Laude, or at the very least within the top 10% of their graduating class.

Our in-house staff functions in an editorial oversight capacity. At least one Senior Editor carefully reviews each project submitted by our contract attorneys before even a rough draft is sent to the client, and also is responsible for the guiding of the progress of the project from the time it first arrives until the time that the finished project is concluded to the client’s satisfaction. If the project is not deemed satisfactory in every respect, it is either sent back to the originating attorney with a list of comments listing items to be corrected or, in some cases, is taken back and reassigned to a Senior Writer in its entirety. On the rare occasions that this occurs, the Senior Writer’s revised work is always reviewed by another Senior Writer, on the theory that a set of “fresh eyes” is the best way to eliminate any tendency toward “tunnel vision.”

At the outside level, we work with a pool of hand-selected attorneys based across the nation who perform each initial research and writing assignment on a contract basis. Each of these attorneys is assigned to a particular Senior Editor who oversees and monitors progress on each assigned project as well as reviews the work product produced. All of our contract attorneys are U.S.-based with the exception of a small portion of the pool whose members specialize in transnational issues, transnational conflicts-of-law issues, and the laws of countries other than the U.S. Each of our contract attorneys is bound by a strict confidentiality and non-disclosure agreement to assure that your clients’ confidences, as well as your own, are completely protected.

How do you insure that your contract attorneys are “first rate” at what they do?

Before we add an attorney to our pool of outside contractors, he or she must first complete a formal application which is then followed up by a thorough background check. This is Step No. 1 in our selection process.

Step No. 2 consists of a rigorous written examination equivalent to many of the toughest state bar examinations. This test is different from the bar exam in that it does not include an equivalent of the multiple-choice “multi-state” portion of the exam. Instead, particular emphasis is placed on legal research and essay writing skills, since these are the skills that are most important to our business.

Step No. 3 consists of a personal interview of each remaining applicant conducted by a Senior Editor. Depending on geographic considerations, this interview may be carried out in person, or by video conference.

This three-step approach assures us – which in turn allows us to assure you – that only the best segment of the available attorneys are utilized for contract assignments.

Where do your senior writers and your contract attorneys’ work? Are they all attorneys, or do you farm out portions of your workload to paralegals and secretaries?

All of our senior writers and contract attorneys live in and work from within the United States. We do not farm out any portion of our substantive workload to any person who is not a licensed, experienced attorney. Non-attorney staff members, such as secretaries, receptionists, etc., work solely in attorney-support capacities such as typing, filing, and the like. You are not billed for any hours that may be expended by these non-attorney support personnel in connection with any of your projects.

How does your firm successfully compete with other companies who offer the services of much lower-paid attorneys, for example, attorneys who went to school in, and are only licensed to practice in, countries such as India?

Put simply: We guarantee the quality of our services unconditionally, and we pay our contract attorneys higher rates than do our U.S.-domiciled competitors. We operate on what we consider to be a much more equitable sharing of the “marginal revenue” our firm generates as between our contract attorneys and managerial compensation and other overhead expenses, so we are successful in getting and retaining the best attorneys available in the outsourcing marketplace.

One of our competitors recently published an article in which explained how its method of operation compares with ours:

“Attorneys in India, on an average, are paid one-third of their U.S. counterparts’ compensation. Furthermore, Indian attorneys who are employed in the private sector are not likely to expect health insurance coverage, any retirement plans, disability benefits, or life insurance as a part of their benefits package. And if any such benefits are provided to attorneys in India, the cost of providing such benefits is generally much lower than in the United States. Given the cost disparities between India and the United States, the resulting cost savings of outsourcing legal work to India could be anywhere between 50 percent and 70 percent of the cost of maintaining comparable staff to perform such work in the U.S.”

Well, you really do get what you pay for.

We have seen dozens of examples of attorney work product generated in India and other countries by our competitors. Fundamentally, India’s written version of English is simply not what any American lawyer or court would call “well written.” Adjectives and adverbs are misplaced; spelling errors abound; run-on sentences that shift from one topic to another in midstream are considered standard; and there is just plain no getting around the sound and the “feel” of the strange syntax. The following language by one writer in India recently appeared, of all places, in the May 16, 2009 edition of The Economist, a publication usually noted for its excellence in editorial and writing style:

“Despite of people having lot better and safer cars here in USA we don’t want to have accidents because of penalties in case of the fault and it affects the driver's ratings which in turn affects the insurance costs and so on. Also for the same reason having have faulty papers, like unpaid registrations and licenses. I have never ever given a bribe in USA, simply because the police officer also has stiff laws to worry about.

Take the following example/analogy for instance that shows how much is behind the legal framework in USA.

This is what you can latterly do, especially if you are a resident of USA. You arrive at New York airport by a plane. Rent a car, with your driver’s license and credit card as only required papers. Drive off, do touring etc until the other end of the country to San Francisco and drop off simply to the location of the same company’s outlet in San Francisco. Pay the rent and you are done!

That one example shows the power of legal system because companies here are not afraid that people will steal there cars. There is a complex and a very sophisticated system of laws and electronic paper-trail for backtracking behind the screen of that example that ensures that the system work.

The example I gave you above is not an extreme example. Such things happen every day (people renting cars and dropping off in another city etc.) here as a part of our lives in west including all North America, UK/Europe. And many other things like the services delivered by municipalities etc.”

We put all of our writing to repeated editorial tests and impose standard formatting requirements to insure that every assignment we produce is first-rate, guaranteed, and in the “American” version of English.

If your outside contract attorneys are of such high quality, why aren’t they out working as practicing lawyers, by themselves or with law firms?

This is a very frequently asked question. The answer is that contract attorneys often have many different personal situations that make the conventional practice of law impractical or inconvenient for them.

We have many contract attorneys who, for instance, have chosen to have a family and stay home to raise small children while the other spouse works outside the home. In another situation, we have two contract attorneys in our pool whose spouses are on active military duty, and hence tend to frequently be transferred from place to place – a situation not conducive to conventional law firm employment, but very adaptable to our own internal structure. Our pool also includes a large number of attorneys who have decided to retire from the day-to-day practice of law, but who quickly find themselves bored and wishing they could somehow practice only part-time and during schedules of their own choosing. Other individuals are just, by nature, not cut out for conventional 9:00am to 5:00pm regularly scheduled hours, and find that they work more effectively when they have the flexibility and freedom to dictate their own calendars. Finally, some contract attorneys have a common habit that, while not conducive to enabling them to practice law on a conventional basis, make them ideal candidates for independent contract work: They are “night owls,” who prefer to sleep by day and work during the night hours, when the phones aren’t ringing and the fax machines are not chirping, so that they can better concentrate on the project at hand.

Wherever they may reside, all of our contract attorneys have full access to our entire on-line library of federal, state, and transnational materials.

Is your company also a law firm? Can you or one of your contract attorneys represent me as my attorney?

We are not a law firm, nor do we actually engage in the practice of law. Practicing law denotes that an attorney-client relationship exists between the lawyer and his or her client, and this is not consistent with the business model upon which our company is based.

We only work for law firms, in-house counsel departments of companies, and individual attorneys. We provide them with research; writing; “brainstorming” about potential legal theories, claims, and defenses; and other incidental services that enable them to carry on their practices more cost-effectively and more efficiently. We do not make court appearances or actually give legal advice. If you have a legal problem, we strongly suggest that you seek appropriate legal counsel from the practicing attorney of your choice.

What services are you equipped to provide?

We are experienced in both litigation as well as transactional matters. Presently, our project load composition is approximately 72% litigation-related, and 29% transactional-related. These percentages fluctuate from time to time, but in general, more of our projects involve litigation matters than transactional situations.

Litigation Services:

Our scope of litigation-related services ranges, beginning at the most rudimentary level, an always-open invitation for you to call and talk with one of our Senior Editors. Maybe you just want to bounce a legal theory off someone for the benefit of their thoughts, or “brainstorm” in more depth about what might be the best approach, theory, or strategy in a particular factual scenario. At the other end of the spectrum, we are equally equipped to fully brief an appeal on your behalf before the United States Supreme Court. In between these two extreme ends, we can assist with document and privilege reviews; the drafting of complaints, cross-complaints, motions to dismiss, demurrers, motions to strike, interrogatories, requests for admissions, notices of depositions, demands for production of documents, demands for physical inspections of premises as well as medical and psychological examinations of litigants and witnesses, applications for provisional remedies, motions for whole or partial summary judgment, jury instructions, appellate briefs, petitions for writs of mandamus or prohibition, and, in general, just about everything you might need to either prosecute or defend your client’s case.

Transactional Services :

We have structured and drafted all of the necessary documents for a wide variety of transactional situations, including, to name just a few, public offerings registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission; public offerings exempt from SEC registration but still subject to state “blue sky” regulations; private placement Offering Circulars for both debt and equity capital; shareholders’ agreements; partnership agreements; REITs (real estate investment trusts); the establishment and operation of family partnerships; the sale, purchase, or other disposition of various types of business interests; recourse and non-recourse project financing arrangements; intellectual property protection mechanisms such as copyright, trademark, and trade name registrations at both the federal and state levels; international trade agreements and their associated financing guarantees for transactions between businesses located in two or more separate countries; estate planning instruments including wills, trusts, gifts, and other tax minimization techniques; the establishment of all types of business entities ranging from simple corporations, partnerships, and limited liability companies to federally-chartered bank holding companies; the structuring and documentation of tax-oriented transactions such as, for example, tax-deferred exchanges under Internal Revenue Code § 1031; franchise syndications; time-sharing arrangements involving both real and personal property (e.g., airplanes); complex warranties covering esoteric products such as wind turbine generators (“WTGs”); agreements establishing insurance and re-insurance protection; the creation and perfection of security interests in both common assets (e.g., real property, equipment, accounts receivable, etc.) as well as not-so-common assets (e.g., U.S. chartered oceangoing vessels, which require a “preferred ship mortgage”), and other types of transactional scenarios too numerous to list fully here.

How does Legal Writing & Research assure the maintenance of client confidentiality?

At the time any project is submitted, the Senior Editor assigned to conduct the first case-intake interview with the client collects, as but one of his or her tasks, sufficient information to perform a conflict-of-interest check. Legal Writing & Research strictly avoids any question, or even appearance, of any conflict of interest by declining employment if it has provided services to opposing counsel on the same case. Further, if two different parties seek to engage Legal Writing & Research to research opposite sides of the same issue for different parties involved in the same litigation, the engagement will be declined and the second of the two requesting parties will be referred to one of our competitors.

Each of our senior writers as well as our contract attorneys are required to sign a strict, non-disclosure agreement covering the entire breadth and scope of any information communicated between us and our individual clients. Internal security is maintained on file servers physically located within the United States, and all information transmitted internally is encrypted utilizing full-drive encryption (“FDE”) rather than the less reliable, though easier to use, file-level encryption (“FLE”) method. Using state-of-the-art FDE, when a particular computer’s hard disk drive is powered on, the drive will not allow access to unencrypted data unless the drive can properly authenticate the user.

Finally, the highest courts of every known United States jurisdiction have for many years held that confidential information given by an attorney to any other expert witness, insurer, paralegal, or outsourcing firm such as Legal Writing & Research retains its privileged character where the purpose is to aid the requesting attorney in giving legal advice to the client. This principle by definition applies to the types of information and communications that will typically take place in every Legal Writing & Research assignment. In addition to the attorney-client privilege, the attorney-work product doctrine likewise applies to communications between the requesting attorney(s) and Legal Writing & Research’s contract attorneys as well as all other staff personnel.

What are the potential ethical ramifications applicable to legal outsourcing?

As of January 1, 2009, the vast majority of federal, state, and specialized courts operating within the United States permit individuals and law firms to outsource even very sensitive legal materials to third-party providers such as Legal Writing & Research, without first disclosing the nature of the arrangement to the assigning attorney’s or firm’s client. It is also permissible within these jurisdictions, provided that certain prerequisites are met, to charge the client a premium above and beyond the amount the attorney or firm has contracted to pay the third-party provider, as compensation for making and overseeing the arrangement, and, ultimately, vouching for the veracity of the outside contractor’s services. Clients should check the rules of their own jurisdictions for further details. A detailed Memorandum of Law addressing in depth all of the potential issues that can arise within the legal outsourcing context is available at no charge to any interested party upon request.