Baker & McKenzie leads a trend which is more a necessity

Few law firms have been as innovative as the largest behemoth of them all - the 1.35 billion dollar Baker & McKenzie. They are actively outsourcing some of their work to their offshore outfits, point and case the Manila office which is currently providing rontline IT support and computer maintenance, marketing support for the firm around the world, word-processing, as well as clerical tasks, some translation work and the icing is - the office undoubtedly will provide full-blown legal research and document drafting for Baker & McKenzie in the U.S
Business Week carried an article to that effect where John Conroy Jr., chairman of Baker & McKenzie's management committee has quoted on legal research and writing "I don't think it's a question of whether, I think it's just a question of when,"

Additionally, Thomas Lifson who is a contributor for The American Thinker concurred to that effect by analyzing the issue and saying ".....it makes perfect sense that certain legal functions, as well as administrative ones as in the case of Baker & McKenzie, can be outsourced. Unless regulatory barriers are errected, this should become a trend. "

This leads to an extremely important observation: Large/Mega firms can benefit from legal outsourcing just as much as smaller firms and in-house counsel. It may seem like a stretch--why would a mega firm with hundreds of nameless associates at its disposal, need legal outsourcing? The simple reason is cost.

More and more in-house counsel are bidding legal work out to law firms on a fixed budget. Straight billing is no longer as common-place as it once used to be. Companies like Cisco Sytems require law firms to bid on and then work within a defined legal budget. Legal outsourcing allows firms to work within these constraints, and just as importantly, to maximize profit. In other words, if a law firm is put on a $100,000 budget, and the actual cost to the law firm to complete the work required is probably between $80-90,000. By using a legal outsroucing provider, the law firm can brings its actual cost down significantly, thus maximizing its profits in any given contract.