E-Discovery Preservation Rules - by State

According to e-Discovery Analysis & Technology Group at K&L Gates Gates, the following is a list of the states with statutes and court rules regarding the discovery of electronically stored information. For specific information including effective dates and applicable statutes, see the complete article Current Listing of States That Have Enacted E-Discovery Rules.

As of July 1, 2008

Arizona
Connecticut
Idaho
Illinois
Indiana
Iowa
Louisiana
Maryland
Minnesota
Mississippi
Montana
Nebraska
New Hampshire
New Jersey
New York
North Carolina
Texas
Utah

How NOT To Hire Lateral

According to The National Law Journal's Stacy Humphries, something is out of balance when it comes to law firm recruiting. Most firms that spend extensive time and resources recruiting inexperienced law school grads, but they are much less organized when competing for lateral hire talent.

According to Humphries, "most law firms have perfected the art of recruiting at the law student level: Send lawyers to law schools, exchange witty (or dull) banter with a number of future lawyers, bring a percentage of the candidates to the firm's office for interviews, make offers and await the flood of acceptances."

But "In contrast to the recruiting of inexperienced law students, firms competing for lateral talent face a more educated, and often more skeptical, audience, which makes it even more critical that the process work smoothly and cohesively."

Humphries gives several examples.

AM Law 100 - Ten Year Trends

For 2008 AM Law 100, The American Lawyer looked back at 1998 to evaluate the trends. Over the past ten years:

• 12 firms died or disappeared into mergers.
• 20 improved their RPL rank by double digits
• 15 dropped by double digits
• 7 moved from the bottom half of the list to the top;
• 5 dropped from the top half to the bottom.
• 3 firms not on the 1998 list placed in the top 30 (Quinn Emanuel; Finnegan Henderson; and Fish & Richardson)
• Bigest winners: Dechert (up 35 places), Akin Gump (up 34), and DLA Piper (up 31).
• Biggest losers: Chadbourne (down 44), and Dewey Ballantine, (down 20) King & Spalding (down 20) and White & Case (down 20).

AM Law 100 - Summary

Some interesting items in the AM Law 100 2008 report:

The recent run of growth and profitability among the AM Law 100 firms has been significant. Since 2003, average revenue per lawyer (RPL) has increased by $205,000. Profit growth was even more impressive. Since 2003, the average profit per partner (PPP) has increased from $860,000 to $1.3 million.

Why the increase? The American Lawyer study reached the follwoing conclusions:

• surging demand for high-end legal services
• unrelenting annual rate hikes.
• benefits of hard work
  
• dramatic slowdown in the naming of new equity partners

The Am Law 100 report also noted:

• Total revenues for this group was $64.5 billion
• Nineteen firms had profits per partner of $2 million or more (Wachtell, Lipton led with a PPP of $4.9 million)
• Average RPL of New York firms was $1.1 million, average RPL for firms born elsewhere was $780,000.
• Head count grew by 6.8 percent to 77,816 lawyers.
• The fastest-growing category of attorneys was nonequity partners, at 35 percent of all partners.