Highlights from the piece include:
- "India’s legal outsourcing industry has grown in recent years... 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."
- “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."
- "Employees at legal outsourcing companies in India are not allowed by Indian law to give legal advice to clients in the West, no matter their qualifications. Instead, legal outsourcing companies perform a lot of the functions that a junior lawyer might do in a American law firm."
- According to Janine Dascenzo, associate general counsel at General Electric, while G.E. “will continue to go to big firms for lawyers who are experts in subject matter, world-class thought leaders and the best litigators," what G.E. does not need is the “army of associates around them. You don’t need a $500-an-hour associate to do things like document review and basic due diligence,” she said.
- "Thanks to India’s low wages and costs and a big pool of young, English-speaking lawyers, outsourcing firms charge from one-tenth to one-third what a Western law firm bills an hour."
- "The number of legal outsourcing companies has more than tripled in the last five years."
- "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."
- “It really is the future of legal services,” says Leah Cooper, former managing lawyer for mining giant RioTinto and current director of legal outsourcing for CPA Global.
