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So it obviously requires tons of attention to detail, but it seems like if the assignment is to spend 10 hours a day reading over somebody's emails and analyzing them, it could be worse, right? Do senior associates/junior partners ever wish they could go back to the "good ole days" of doing doc review?

EDIT: 12 hours a day

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tlstlstls73 wrote:So it obviously requires tons of attention to detail, but it seems like if the assignment is to spend 10 hours a day reading over somebody's emails and analyzing them, it could be worse, right? Do senior associates/junior partners ever wish they could go back to the "good ole days" of doing doc review?

EDIT: 12 hours a day

The hardest part about doc review is staying awake. Even if your firm farms most your doc-review out to contract attorneys, there's still a chance that, as a junior lit associate, you'll have to do some. womp womp.

On the plus side, knowing the documents really helps in understanding contentious issues in your case.

In my opinion, it depends on the case and practice area. Like right now I'm doing a lot of it, but the company is super high-profile and a big player in the industry I'm most interested in working with. So I'm learning a ton about the dynamics of the industry and this company, and I now know things that many people have been trying to figure out for years. Of course I will never share any of it, but I think even the sort of trade-secret aspects will inform me in the future.

Reading other people's emails can, as you suggest, be all right. Sometimes I get way too much enjoyment out of it.

Doc review can be monotonous regardless, and I would not want to do it full-time. But doing it as part of a job where you are also doing other things is not bad at all.

Not sure if srs...

Is the possibility that people could question the conventional wisdom on doc review that unfathomable to you?

An associate at the firm where I am SA'ing next year told me that it's a good way to work from home and fill in billable hours.

Any white collar work involves some level of busywork/tedium. Like so many things around here, I think doc review gets mostly knocked by people who have never really been out in the real world.

As long as it's not most of what I do, doc review sounds fine.

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it can be surprisingly interesting, depending on the type of case. or horribly monotonous. As long as you aren't doing it all day every day, it can be nice to just have easy hours and to sort of intellectually zone out for a bit while.