Legal Services Enter Outsourcing Domain - Excerpts

It happened with tech support, financial services and catalog order-taking. Now, a growing number of U.S. and British companies outsourcing legal work to India
The practice started a few years ago with simple word processing and filing services performed by non-lawyers. But increasingly, squads of experienced but inexpensive lawyers based in India are doing things ranging from patent applications to divorce papers to legal research for Western clients............
“If you have large volumes of documentation or a repetitive activity that can be easily emailed or scanned, it can be outsourced,” says Mathew Banks, a British attorney who is the chief executive officer of ALMT Synergies, a new legal outsourcing firm in Mumbai. “Anything is possible.”

And lowering costs lets companies spread their limited legal budgets more broadly. “It gives me more time to do other things,” says Rishi Varma, general counsel for Trico Marine Services, a Houston-based offshore drilling support company...........

Indeed, outsourcing could ultimately change the way legal work is done in Western countries, industry analysts and company executives say. They expect it to free up American and British lawyers from time-consuming paperwork, allowing small firms to take on bigger cases -- while cutting the number of legal jobs needed in the U.S. Some suggest it could even encourage companies and individuals to become more litigious by lowering the costs of filing lawsuits.

While American law firms routinely use domestic contract lawyers to save money, most have been slow to send work to India. Gregg Kirchhoefer, a partner at Kirkland & Ellis of Chicago, one of the more prestigious and profitable American firms, estimates it could be 50 years before lawyers in India do more than “routine prosaic” American legal work. He expressed reservations about whether Indian lawyers are ready to handle the complex, high-end work in which his firm specializes. “Firms like ours that work on complicated and significant cases don’t expect the main part of that work effort to be done [offshore] at the same level we do it,” he says........

By ERIC BELLMAN and NATHAN KOI’PEL
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
September 28, 2005