Outsourced legal work offers advantages

ILLINOIS: Paralegals group appeals to Chicago firms to buck trend

BY MOUSHUMI ANAND
Medill News Service

This story ran on nwitimes.com on Tuesday, December 5, 2006 12:47 AM CST

Ruby Prasad's legal research and briefs regularly find their way into courts across the United States despite the fact she has never stepped foot in a U.S. courtroom or anywhere else in the country.

In fact, her workstation is located 8,000 miles away in India.

Prasad is among the 200 lawyers working for Chicago-based Mindcrest Inc., which has an outsourcing facility in Mumbai.

Her company, along with other legal outsourcing firms, is experiencing explosive growth. From just 20 lawyers two years ago, Mindcrest now is 10 times its original size.

According to George Hefferan, the company's vice president and general counsel, Mindcrest plans to add 200 more employees by the end of 2007.

Atlas Legal Research, another legal outsourcing company with offices in Bangalore, India, and Fort Worth, Texas, also grew tenfold in the last two years. The company employed three attorneys in India in 2004. Today, it has 30.

Legal outsourcing companies provide services to legal departments of corporations and law firms from their foreign facilities. The companies, based in India and elsewhere, conduct legal research, document review, due diligence reports on mergers and acquisitions, and administrative work, as well as draft legal documents.

"During my association with an Indian law firm at the start of my career, I realized that I was more interested in doing work relating to legal research and drafting than practicing law," said the 28-year-old Prasad.

India's legal and educational systems help make the country a preferred destination from which to outsource work.

"India has a common law system with similar torts and level of complexity, and that kind of training is sufficient for the work the legal associates do," said Paul Bernstein, president of the Chicago Bar Association's law office technology committee.

He added that the time difference between India and the Unites States -- 11 1/2 hours -- is another advantage for outsourcing jobs. As lawyers finish their work in the United States, a new work day begins for legal associates in India.

According to Bernstein, that enables the associates to get the research ready for attorneys in the United States before they return to work the next morning.

But the outsourcing sector has caused some concern for the Illinois Paralegal Association. The 1,500-member organization's board of directors distributed a letter to 300 Chicago area companies asking them to use paralegals rather than outsourcing.

The letter said work done by paralegals is quality controlled and cost efficient. The letter added that experienced paralegals perform high-level substantive work under direct supervision of an attorney at lower billing rates than attorneys.

But despite the worries, Bernstein said the trend is here to stay. And as for Prasad, she said it was a good career move.

"I visualizes a bright and promising future for those associated with legal process outsourcing services," she said.

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