Extract from Cassandre Coyer’s article “‘Jacks and Jills of All Trades?’ Hard-to-Get E-Discovery Project Managers Face Growing Workloads”
In a matter of years, the e-discovery market has turned into a stiff game of musical chairs where it’s not the chairs that are taken away—it’s the talent.
For a while now, legal departments, firms and alternative legal service providers (ALSPs) have been competing to hire—and retain—in-demand e-discovery project managers, leaving those with the right expertise facing more responsibilities than they might have expected.
As e-discovery project managers face increased workloads and constantly evolving data types, their role is requiring a more sophisticated skill level than ever. Certainly, the refinement of their role is only worsening a job market already plagued with tight competition between vendors, ASLPs and firms all on the hunt for talent.
“There’s just so many pieces to an e-discovery type of project, that the level of sophistication that we demand from project managers is not what it used to be,” said Joseph Tate, counsel and managing director of CODISCOVR at Cozen O’Connor, where he focuses his practice on e-discovery, information governance and data management issues.
One reason for that is the increase in types of data found in e-discovery, said Mary Mack, CEO and chief legal technologist for Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM).
