What % of work is doc review then? It sounds like almost all of your hours are billed there? Does it actually make a difference what market you are in?
Good question. It all depends on what comes your way and what practice group you are assigned to within the Litigation Department of your firm.
I should have clarified up front, I am in Commercial Litigation, sometimes referred to as "General Litigation" at some firms because it can span different practice areas. For example, I do general run of the mill commercial litigation cases (where most of the doc reviews take place), IP litigation cases (which can also get into substantial and quite complicated doc reviews), securities litigation cases (which tend to involve doc reviews in response to SEC inquiries) and every now and again the bankruptcy folks will throw a little work my way but I'm not really too well versed on bankruptcy matters (although I probably should be considering this economy).
Now, within the Litigation Dept, if I was assigned to the Labor & Employment practice group for example, then I would effectively have 0 hours of doc review work b/c they don't really do that stuff.
So I don't want to paint the picture that you will automatically spend 90% of your time running doc reviews b/c that may not be the case, depending on what practice group you are in within litigation.
Now all this time I've been talking about "Litigation" which is one of two sides to any biglaw firm. The other side is the "Transactional" side, aka "Corporate." They don't do "doc review" but they have their own version of tedious doc review work known as "due diligence," which as I understand it is basically reviewing contract language for really big deals for many hours at a time.
But to answer your question with my own experience, during my first year I would venture to guess that I probably billed about...60-70% of my
billable time (pro bono is non-billable) on doc review. The other 30-40% of billable time was billed to various legal research, motions, drafting of documents, attending depositions, attending court, etc.