Quotas

**Quotas - yes, even lawyers use them. The first temp job I worked had a quota of about 25 documents per hour, or roughly 200-250 per day. The first project I worked on here had a quota of 40 docs per hour, and it freaked me out a little bit. I had to wrap my mind around working some in between surfing the web and emailing my friends and working on my pro bono cases and frantically looking for a Real Job.

After working on this current project for over a year, we finally got a number, but only because we have a production deadline set by a judge who means business and a whole bunch of new people who aren't yet "up to speed." That number is 78 docs per hour and it seems to freak out the newbies quite a bit. Given that I've been working with basically the same set of issues for a long time, I get to help train the newbies and QC their work. Well, not just me, of course. There's 5 of us here who've been doing this task.

Here's the procedure: we get a batch of 1000 docs at a time and the Real Employee (who isn't a lawyer, btw) has said that she expects us to get through a batch in a day and a half. You look at the document, decide if it's relevant, and if it's not, move to the next document. It's not rocket science, but most associates do this for several years in the big firms, so I hear (they also bill out at $275/hour). They're also not nearly as fast as I am, nor dare I say, as accurate. (I've had occasion to review some of their work, and really, they're not worth it.) I think that my personal record is just under 500 docs per hour. It was one of those days when I wondered how fast could I actually go without losing all semblance of accuracy and how long could I pay attention to document coding? That's usually the kicker - it's hard to concentrate long enough, because coding is really quite boring. To do it fast & accurately, it also requires hyper-focus, which is difficult for me to maintain when I'm really not interested in the subject matter. Normally, when I'm feeling slacky, I'll limit myself to 200 per hour, so in an 8-hour shift (like yesterday), I'll do 1,600 documents.

I have this crazy notion in my head that one of the Real Employees will notice that I'm really good at not only document review, but also training attorneys to do this stultifyingly dull yet very necessary job. So most days I make myself do the work of 3 temps. Sometimes only 2, sometimes 4 or more, but usually 3. If their quota is 78 docs per hour, mine is 234.

There's a deadline for this source on August 2, but the 45,000 docs won't be loaded onto the server until early this morning. Real Employee has asked that we work a lot today. I think I'll see if I can code 4,000 docs. Not that anyone will notice.

I think that 4,000 is entirely possible. They apparently just collected this source's entire email account for the past several years. There's so much non-relevant stuff that I just got through 500 docs in 35 minutes. On to another 500...