Melissa Kluger Click here to see full sized version.

When Melissa Kluger decided to leave her media law practice with Toronto’s Brian MacLeod Rogers in the summer of 2005 to focus on creating her own law magazine, she was faced with a dilemma.

“I needed to work,” she said. “I wanted to continue being involved in law, and continue doing work as a lawyer, but I needed to be somewhere where my time was very flexible, and I could also be pursuing this other dream.”

Kluger’s solution was to take a job with a legal outsourcing firm that employs contract lawyers.

“There are a lot of people interested in the practice of law, but who are not wedded to the idea of that whole partnership-track behaviour of seven days a week, 2000-plus hours of billable time, [and] worrying about being an equity partner,” said Michael Burn, president and founder of Litigation Management Inc. “People who have actually scaled-back expectations, are happy to be sort of comfortable in terms of income and have much more control over what they do.”

Kluger says her media law firm had employed LMI in the past to help it with a case that had a large volume of documents, and she got back in touch with the agency when she needed work.
“They said, ‘There’s something starting tomorrow.’ And I took it from there.”

Lawyers seeking contracting work should be aware that each firm may have something different to offer. Burn says that LMI, for example, differs somewhat from legal research firms or other technologically-based litigation support firms he calls “document scanners” in that it specializes in not only document management but litigation support — and tailors its services to each job that comes in the door. Burn says his lawyers are contracted to do a variety of tasks, ranging from document management, drafting documents and facta, all the way up to helping with the interrogation of witnesses and trial preparation. 

“We’ve had cases where the lawyers have helped in whatever way junior counsel can help.”

Similarly, Stephen Taran, founder of London, Ontario’s Taran Virtual Associates, told The Lawyers Weekly (see Aug. 9 issue) that most of his company’s business is legal research, but their lawyers also write for legal publications, interview clients and witnesses, and locate experts.

Kluger, for example, said she was assigned by LMI to a document management team of three lawyers working on a high-profile securities case being outsourced by a “top-seven” Bay Street law firm, and the team spent the next three months reviewing documents and determining their relevance. She said the lawyers would check off boxes on an electronic system to indicate the relevance of the document, clicking “hot document” for something really exciting, or simply catalogue the documents by their relevance to the investigation.

Kluger said that because it was such a high-profile case, she found reviewing the documents exciting — and she was just as excited to have the flexibility she wanted to do the other things she needed to do.

“It wasn’t the kind of work I had to think about overnight. I could just come back in the next day and start again.”

Kluger said she tended to work six to eight hours a day, and liked how she didn’t have to set a schedule. She said she sometimes took mornings off, or took long lunches to attend meetings and worked on the weekends instead.

Burn said LMI would hire more people rather than ask people to work more hours and more days like full-time lawyers.

“Our people are contracted on an hourly basis, where the longer they work, the more they make, rather than being in an environment where your income on an hourly basis goes down.”

Another lawyer who took advantage of a contract position, Aleksander Hynna, now counsel with the federal Department of Justice with Indian and Northern Affairs, tells a similar tale of the time he spent working for TVA:

“I had quit my position at a law firm [Blake, Cassels & Graydon LLP] — I had decided to make a move to more public-law type things,” he said, “and it took a little bit longer than I expected to find a position... I was looking for some work in the meantime and a friend had mentioned that she had done some work for Taran Virtual Associates, Inc., and I called them up and they sent some contracting work my way.”

He said that TVA gave him a deadline for completing the work, but it was up to him how to put in the hours; and he agreed that the biggest advantage in working for an outsourcing firm is flexibility.
“Absolutely,” he says. “I think it’s a great interim measure for people making transitions.”

Such an arrangement might also be useful for parents with young kids who wanted to stay active legally, but who don’t want to take on a full-time position, he added. “And I worked with a sole practitioner who had some capacity at that particular time and was looking for a little bit more work,” he said, “knowing that when his own practice got busy again, he could just stop taking assignments.”

Given the advantages of this kind of work, lawyers considering it as a career option must be wondering: how well are these contract lawyers paid? Does it compare to Bay Street?

“On a dollar for dollar basis, I don’t think we’re competitive [with the Bay Street firms]...” said Michael Burn, of Litigation Management Inc., who refused to give a dollar figure with regard to contract lawyers’ salaries – or even a range. “I still break out in a sweat when I hear what younger lawyers are making these days ... What we offer is a different environment where people have consciously made that decision to trade off.”

“The contracting agency takes a significant cut,” said Hynna, who worked for TVA, and who noted that he still had to pay his insurance and law society fees. “But on the other hand, they source the client, they sort of determine the scope for the work, they deal with the client almost exclusively and they take care of all the billing. So I was making much less [as a contract lawyer], but I was still doing well for what it was. My overhead was very low.”

Taran told The Lawyers Weekly that his firm employs lawyers across Canada. But besides LMI and TVA, other firms worth investigating for lawyers interested in obtaining contract work include Searchlight Systems Ltd., in Vancouver, and Commonwealth Legal Inc. in Toronto. 

Anita Lerek, from Advocate Placement Ltd. in Toronto, whose  agency finds lawyers in-house part-time work, said, the key was for lawyers to keep their skills up. “What they can do is use their solid skills to parley them into a more charitable, looser framework — but they’ve got to keep their skills up.”

For lawyers who obtain  such contract work, it may even lead to other opportunities. Take Kluger, for example, whose project with LMI was put on hold after three months.

“I was fortunate to quickly pick up another job, doing similar kind of work on a different case, doing document review at a law firm,” she said. “They weren’t outsourcing, they were trying to bring more people in to do work on their projects in-house.”

 “I was able to say: ‘I’ve been doing this kind of work for three months, and if you have a project where you need people, I’m just the right person.’”

With her magazine at least a year from hitting the street, Kluger says she hopes to work for LMI again in the future.

“It’s been very valuable to me to be able to continue to be involved in law, and involved in the profession, seeing different kinds of law and the ways it’s being practised, and at the same time having the freedom and flexibility to pursue my other interests that are law-related but not law in the traditional sense.”

“It worked out well for me,” said Hynna. “It was a very positive experience.”

“This whole concept is still in its infancy, but I really think it’s going to take off,” said Burn.