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Hiring Robert Half Legal Project Attorneys Saves Client Over $2 Million
Client Profile Industry: Consumer Goods
Revenue: $36.1 billion

Business Situation
The organization is a recognized name in the consumer goods industry, with over 2,400 locations throughout North America. Recently, the company merged with another leading organization, which led to a strategic downsizing of corporate personnel. The overall corporate downsizing included their legal department, which went from over 120 legal professionals to 70. They were therefore understaffed and unable to adequately prepare for a class-action lawsuit. The organization needed to hire a significant number of project attorneys with the ability to "hit the ground running." This client needed to staff up quickly, while also keeping costs to a manageable level. Robert Half Legal was called in to provide a fast, turnkey solution to the challenge.

Project Scope
The project consisted of reviewing thousands of email documents and files of former and current company associates that might contain information relating to the class-action litigation. The necessary workload - reviewing over 400,000 email documents and attachments - was beyond the scope of what the company's legal personnel could accomplish - and would have been much too costly. The Robert Half Legal Account Executive quickly provided 35 project attorneys who had the necessary backgrounds to quickly take over the project. These attorneys operated on-site, and were able to share information and ask questions of each other. They reviewed over 450,000 emails and attachments, 120,000 loose files (stored in shared or private folders) and went through 30 different sets of discovery. They also redacted 5,000 privileged/ confidential items and were responsible for reviewing and tagging each document with a category and action. The benchmark for each of the Robert Half Legal consultants was to review at least 300 documents a day to enable the project to be completed within the court-ordered timeframe.

Client's Return on Investment
The Robert Half Legal consultants completed their work with only a 6% error rate, and the client estimates that they saved an amazing $2 million vs. hiring full-time employees. Attorneys in this situation have to adapt to new processes and procedures and the Robert Half Legal team was very professional, skilled and flexible. Progress was closely monitored - and all of the Robert Half Legal project attorneys achieved their goals - which meant the client was able to meet its court dates without penalties. They considered the Robert Half Legal experience to have been a true partnership. The client spoke highly of the Robert Half Legal Account Executive's responsiveness and ability to know the right skill sets for their particular needs. In addition, this client carefully assesses software tools for use in discovery cases, and they received valuable feedback from the Robert Half Legal project attorneys on the software. Because of the high-quality, low-cost aspect of using Robert Half Legal project attorneys, the organization has since signed an exclusivity agreement with Robert Half Legal to provide project attorneys for their entire department. They have also directed their outside counsel to use Robert Half Legal - which, thanks to substantially lower billing rates, will provide the client with significant savings.