The typical practice in securities class actions, according to lawyers on both sides I have spoken with, is to hire contract attorneys to perform the grunt work of sifting through millions of pages of documents obtained in discovery.

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But a revealing New York Times story today describes how startups are increasingly eschewing hiring, instead bringing on contract employees and part-timers to perform the work previously handled by full-time employees.

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Those are the facts necessary to satisfy the elements of a claim for, say, breach of contract: promise, consideration, failure to perform, causation and damages, or the requirements of an affirmative defense: impossibility of performance, for instance.

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