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August 4, 2010
NY Times: Outsourcing to India Draws Western Lawyers
New York Times, Outsourcing to India Draws Western Lawyers:India’s legal outsourcing industry has grown in recent years from an experimental endeavor to a small but mainstream part of the global business of law. Cash-conscious Wall Street banks, mining giants, insurance firms and industrial conglomerates are hiring lawyers in India for document review, due diligence, contract management and more.
Now, to win new clients and take on more sophisticated work, legal outsourcing firms in India are actively recruiting experienced lawyers from the West. And U.S. and British lawyers — who might once have turned up their noses at the idea of moving to India or harbored an outright hostility to outsourcing legal work in principle — are re-evaluating the sector.
The number of legal outsourcing companies in India has mushroomed from 40 in 2005 to more than 140 at the end of 2009, according to Valuenotes, a consulting firm in Pune, India. Revenue at India’s legal outsourcing firms is expected to grow to $440 million this year, up 38 percent from 2008, and should surpass $1 billion by 2014, Valuenotes estimates.
“This is not a blip, this is a big historical movement,” said David B. Wilkins, director of Harvard Law School’s program on the legal profession. “There is an increasing pressure by clients to reduce costs and increase efficiency,” he added, and with companies already familiar with outsourcing tasks like information technology work to India, legal services is a natural next step.
So far, the number of Western lawyers moving to outsourcing companies could be called more of a trickle then a flood. But that may change, as more business flows out of traditional law firms and into India. Compensation for top managers at legal outsourcing firms is competitive with salaries at midsize law firms outside of major U.S. metro areas, executives in the industry say. Living costs are much lower in India, and often, there is the added allure of stock in the outsourcing company.
Right now, Pangea3 is “getting more résumés from United States lawyers than we know what to do with,” said Greg McPolin, managing director of the company’s litigation services group, who divides his time between India and New York. ...
Many legal outsourcing firms have offices around the world to interact with clients, but keep the majority of their employees in India; some also have a stable of lawyers in the Philippines. Thanks to India’s low wages and costs and a big pool of young, English-speaking lawyers, outsourcing firms charge between one-third and one-tenth what a Western law firm bills per hour. ... Even white-shoe law firms like Clifford Chance are embracing the concept. ...
Many corporations agree that outsourcing legal work, in some form or another, is here to stay.
“We will continue to go to big firms for the lawyers they have who are experts in subject matter, world-class thought leaders and the best litigators and regulatory lawyers around the world — and we will pay a lot of money for those lawyers,” said Janine Dascenzo, associate general counsel at G.E.
What G.E. does not need, though, is the “army of associates around them,” Ms. Dascenzo said. “You don’t need a $500-an-hour associate to do things like document review and basic due diligence,” she said.
- Above the Law, Outsourcing: Here Come the Expats
- Wall Street Journal Law Blog, Go East, Young Lawyer . . . Way East
(Hat Tip: Brad Mank.)
August 4, 2010 in Legal Education, Tax | Permalink
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Comments
Hmmm...at some point, we're going to cut out the India middleman and just pay people less. Why not just find low cost people in lower cost areas in the US? That point always drove me nuts when people talked about "needing" to use professionals a half a world away.
Personally, I would pay more for a lawyer who spoke the language naively and lived in the same country as they were practicing.
Posted by: Amy | Aug 5, 2010 5:37:14 PM
I'm one of those U.S. lawyers who outsourced himself to India. I did not do it for lack of a job elsewhere. I'm a Columbia Law graduate and one of the founding partners of a successful New York and London based media law firm. I went to India enthusiastically, to take part in a much-needed revolution in the way legal services are delivered in the West.
Imagine a new legal landscape where high-quality services are affordable. Imagine deals getting done, because the attorneys don't kill them, with overlawyering and overcharging. Contemplate court cases and other disputes being resolved on their merits, rather than simply on the basis of whether one side cannot or will not pay the absurdly high costs of litigation. Think about legal professionals located in places that suit the interests of clients, rather than in the most expensive parts of the most expensive cities in the world. Consider the resultant savings when legal bills are based on services, not real estate. Envision deals and cases staffed by the most talented and enthusiastic lawyers available. Open your mind to the possibility that some of those lawyers are in India. I know from experience that they are.
And consider the fact that this kind of outsourcing actually creates more legal jobs in the West, rather than cutting them. Every time a deal is done, or a litigation is waged, because legal services are suddenly affordable, it means more work for the Western lawyers involved in supervision, editing, negotiating, and/or appearing in court. This is not only a dream. It is happening every day, thanks to legal outsourcing in India.
For example, a Fortune 100 client of my law firm specifically requested that the legal research and analysis needed for a series of multi-million-dollar deals in the U.S. be done by Indian attorneys at our offshore operation in Mysore. This is a situation where, if not for a Western law firm’s off-shoring capabilities, no lawyers would have been hired, because typical Western legal fees would have made it prohibitive. The work would have been done either in-house, or not at all. Because the India team made it possible for the deals to happen, Western law firms ultimately got more business, handling the otherwise non-existent transactions.
A similar phenomenon has happened in litigation, where corporate clients have chosen to defend themselves against meritless lawsuits, using both U.S. and Indian lawyers. The most high-profile examples are some of the cases filed in Los Angeles against comedian Sacha Baron Cohen. They have been dismissed instead of settled, because of the successful teamwork among attorneys in the U.S. and India. Without legal outsourcing, there might have been no U.S. lawyers hired for any significant litigation work at all, because frivolous cases often are settled at the outset, just to avoid the usual U.S. litigation costs. The off-shoring of legal work is leading to a new breed of benign tort reform, as defendants facing bogus or inflated tort claims are choosing to litigate and win. This in turn discourages such claims. And the money that otherwise would be spent by defendants on nuisance payouts can be plowed by corporations right back into the U.S. economy.
Does any of this threaten the existence of U.S. law firms? No, unless you want to define American law firms as inherently dinosaur-like, and incapable of changing to avoid extinction. No, the threat is not to law firms themselves, but to an outmoded model of law practice that clients increasingly will not tolerate. We are witnessing the start of a positive, paradigm shift in the way that legal services will be delivered in the West.
Some law firms are embracing the change, and reaping rewards from it. One example is our own law firm. As a result of setting up our own legal outsourcing company in India, our law firm is receiving more client revenue, not less. This is coming in part from (a) existing clients who send us “elective” legal work that otherwise would never be performed, due to cost, but which is not a problem when our U.S. lawyers are paid only to supervise and edit the work of attorneys in India, and (b) new clients who come to our law firm only because of our reputation for developing an alternative to the old model.
So there is no need to start making funeral arrangements for the U.S. legal industry. Forward-thinking law firms will adapt, embrace legal off-shoring, and learn how to make it serve not only the interests of their clients, but their own.
Russell Smith
SmithDehn LLP
SDD Global Solutions
http://www.sddglobal.com
Posted by: Russell Smith | Aug 7, 2010 5:29:38 AM
