Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software
When five television studios became entangled in a Justice Department antitrust lawsuit against CBS, the cost was immense. As part of the obscure task of “discovery” — providing documents relevant to a lawsuit …
Context & Ripple Effects
A Justice Department antitrust case involving CBS and five television studios puts the usually back-office task of discovery under a cost microscope. Software-assisted document review matters because it shifts part of that workload away from large teams of billable lawyers.
First-order effects
- CBS, the five studios and their outside counsel can use cheaper software for discovery review, reducing the lawyer hours required to produce and assess case documents.
- Law firms working on document-heavy disputes face immediate pressure to reserve human review for tasks software cannot perform as cheaply.
Second-order effects
- Corporate legal buyers gain a clearer basis to challenge discovery bills, forcing law firms to compete on review efficiency as well as legal expertise.
- Providers of discovery software gain access to a litigation workflow previously staffed primarily through junior-lawyer and contract-review teams.
Third-order effects
- If courts and litigants accept software-led review as reliable, discovery work shifts from a labor-scaled legal service toward a technology-enabled process, repricing a major component of complex litigation.
- The division of labor in large cases may increasingly separate document sorting from legal judgment, concentrating lawyer time on strategy, privilege decisions and advocacy.
The trend: Complex litigation is beginning to unbundle routine document review from high-value legal judgment as software lowers the cost of discovery.