India rides outsourcing boom to capture legal work

Sunday, 16 October , 2005, 10:06
New Delhi: India's growing pool of lawyers are being tapped to provide paralegal services for customers from the United States as the next frontier in the country's booming outsourcing sector, executives say.
Companies in India are offering trained lawyers using legal databases such as Westlaw and Lexis/Nexis to provide law firms in the United States with low-cost research, writing and analysis in a move to capture a market worth billions of dollars.
"We did a survey of corporate houses in the US in which 86 per cent identified the high cost of legal services as their number one cost worry," said Sanjay Kamlani, co-founder of the legal outsourcing firm Pangea3 LLC.
"Add to that there are one million lawyers in India and 70,000 graduating from law schools every year. We realised that we had an enormous business opportunity," he said.
The National Association of Software and Service Companies, an Indian lobby group, said in July that outsourcing firms had barely scratched the potential of the estimated $250 billion legal services market. It estimates Indian firms now get $60 to $80 million worth of outsourced legal business annually.
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