How to Start a Legal Sweat Shop! Forum

[PLATONiC]

I'm not sure what type of responses I'll be getting for setting up a post like this, but.. here goes: Aside from the other funny ideas that I have every now and then, I thought of how it would be to start a Doc Review solutions company.

I noticed that there are a lot of temp attorney companies here (U.S.) and there (India).

Does anyone know where I can find an estimated percentage of discovery work being outsourced to India?
Do law firms hire a lot of temp attorneys in-house, or do they rely on these doc review companies to take care of menial legal tasks?

I know that starting a legal sweat shop might not be as lucrative as the average law firm (not sure on this, though - debatable), but I think it'll be an interesting experience. I'm wondering if it's possible to create a start-up doc review sweat shop with permanent doc review attorneys. I think this'll be very suitable for foreign language document review specialists. Does anyone have any ideas on this? I'm assuming that I'd have to hire other temps if the workload gets very heavy, but that doesn't seem that difficult to do.

Any relevant questions, comments, or concerns would be awesomely appreciated.

[PLATONiC]

One more thing I want to touch on:

The over-time charges is what technically kills doc review costs, so what if I did the Wal-Mart method of placing a cap of 40 hours a week? I did the math:

40 hr X $30 (Metro Area Hourly Rate) = $1,200/Week
$1,200 X 50weeks = $60,000!

So these associates can be going home with $60,000/year:D

Now this gets me to question what it would be like to try and place flat fees on doc review projects with my associates billing hours instead...

[TTH]

DIAF

[PLATONiC]

DIAF

I'm sorry, I'm an unintelligent sweatshop manager. Could you please explain what DIAF means?

[Duralex]

Die in a fire.

And if you were to do this, why the hell would you pay overtime? Open shops in different time zones and operate 24/7. Say, Ireland-Hungary-India-Philippines. The digital herd likes to drives its global lexus across a flat world, and won't stop for your silly human factors. So sayeth the Walrus.

[PLATONiC]

Speaking of overtime, though, I would really love to take a look at the internal accounting for these doc review solutions companies. Does anybody know how the profit structure to these organizations work?