Lawyers hold about 656,000 jobs in the United States. About three-fourths of the lawyers practice privately, either in law firms or in solo practices. Most of the remaining lawyers hold positions in government, the greatest number at the local level. Other lawyers are employed as house counsel by public utilities, banks, insurance companies, real estate agencies, manufacturing firms, welfare and religious organizations, and other business firms and nonprofit organizations. Some salaried lawyers also have part-time independent law practices; others work as lawyers part-time while working full-time in another occupation.
Law firms and legal organizations increasingly use both paralegals and attorneys as legal temps in many areas. For example, multi-district litigation cases, class action lawsuits, major antitrust proceedings, wide-scale discrimination cases, some products liability cases, and major personal injury disaster cases (stemming from airplane crashes, explosions, mass food poisonings, rail derailments, ship or truck wrecks involving toxic chemicals, etc.) can occur in every state and impose extraordinary time and personnel demands on both plaintiff and defense law firms. Since by their very nature these litigation events are unpredictable, law firms cannot plan the deployment of their permanent full-time staff-thus necessitating the growing use of legal temps.
During pretrial discovery in such cases, tens of thousands and sometimes hundreds of thousands of computer files and paper files have to be examined by both plaintiff and defense law firms; thousands of witnesses have to be interviewed, and hundreds if not thousands of exhibits have to be prepared by each party's attorneys. This starts a chain reaction of time and energy requirements where, for example, the corporate law firm representing defendant corporations faces unexpected demands and needs additional staffing. Plaintiff's counsel often is a law firm or even a solo practitioner who is very proficient in the law but very limited in resources and staff.
In the Corrugated Box antitrust case tried in Houston in the late 1980s, every packaging container manufacturer and distributor in the United States was involved either as a party or as a potential witness in a case that lasted several years. In 1978, when a train carrying a boxcar of the toxic chemical Dioxin derailed near Centralia in Illinois, the resulting lawsuits numbered in the thousands and took seven years of actual court time to try. The IBM antitrust case in New York and the AT&T antitrust case in Washington, DC, took years to litigate and resolve. Currently, the dozens of class action lawsuits against the tobacco companies could be tried in court or could be settled at any time, as witness the settlement by Liggett Group Inc. in March 1997 and the summer 1997 settlement with nearly 40 state attorneys general.
When the plaintiffs' lawyers in class actions in Mississippi, Florida, and Louisiana (where the cigarette companies have been sued about the deleterious effects of tobacco) request hundreds of thousands of documents about cigarette research and marketing covering the years 1938 through 1994, defense counsel have no way to cope except through additional staff. In these kinds of cases, plaintiff's counsel and defense counsel have to expand their staff to handle these situations.
So both plaintiff's lawyers and defense lawyers need to employ additional legal staff such as attorneys and paralegals. Their choice is to retain them on a permanent basis or use temps. If the law firms hire a lot of legal full-time help, some of their worst nightmares could actually happen. What if the lawsuits are settled the week after they hire more full-time legal help? What if the discovery phase is suddenly limited by the judge and the court? What if a motion to dismiss the case is unexpectedly granted?
The law firms cannot retain permanent attorneys and paralegals for these purposes, since at the conclusion of the case-which can occur unexpectedly at any time (such as the recent tobacco settlements)-they would suddenly be overstaffed. Professional firms, such as lawyers, do not want to acquire a reputation for downsizing and professional layoffs, so they increasingly make use of legal temps.
Because of these problems and the concomitant explosion of litigation in the United States in the past 20 years, law firms face these staffing and hiring decisions every month.
