I realize that when bankruptcy lawyers charge hundred of millions of dollars for handling bankruptcy cases that a measly $183,000 is a drop in the bucket. Nevertheless, I was shocked to read in this article, Legal Fees Pile Up for Delta, Northwest, that in the Northwest bankruptcy proceeding, one law firm billed more than $183,000 for online research.
How do you justify that kind of charge? For starters, by now, most firms can purchase top of the line, full service LEXIS or Westlaw, which allows for unlimited searches, for several hundred dollars a month. Let's just assume for the sake of argument that the firm in question pays $1000 per month for LEXIS or Westlaw for each attorney in the firm. At $183,000, that's 183 months worth of service. Even assuming that twenty attorneys are working the case, that would mean that each is working on the bankruptcy matter for nine full months (I assume that if they are working on other matters, the cost would be pro-rated). So that's my first point: I just don't understand how a firm could pay so much for online service.
Second, and more to the point, the cost of online service ought to be rolled into a firm's overhead. Firms never billed clients to retain libraries and online research service has in most cases effectively replaced law firm libraries. Moreover, online research is now priced at flat fees, rather than per search, which makes it more amenable to inclusion in overhead rather than pro rated.
What's sad is that the sophisticated clients that hire these firms don't even know that they're being overcharged. And that's why these types of fees will continue: because until clients put pressure on law firms to charge less, the firms have no incentive to do so.
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
Monday, March 13, 2006
"What Differentiates Our Firm Is..." [Nothing]
A very interesting article about how marketing works in the legal industry from Adam Smith Esq's blog - http://www.adamsmithesq.com/blog
A reader (partner in an AmLaw 10 firm) writes:
"Most businesses know their leading indicators of sales. For example, if the company increases the number of sales calls in January, there will be more sales in April. "Has anyone analyzed empirically what the leading indicators of sales are for AmLaw 200 law firms? Do the indicators include ads in the trade press? Fancy dinners with potential clients? Rounds of golf with potential clients? Publishing articles in legal or trade journals? Giving speeches? Winning jury trials? Closing big deals? "It strikes me that law firms have very little idea of what business development activities they really want to encourage among their lawyers and so take a scattershot approach to the effort. "Has anyone thought intelligently about this?"
This is a fascinating question. So, after a relative drought of pieces on law firm marketing, we have our second in one week.
My immediate response is: Most firms are probably clueless about this. (And if someone out there really is doing empirically-driven marketing, please raise your hand; I would be delighted to give you the recognition you deserve [unless you would deem it be revealing a competitive advantage, in which case we can talk not-for-attribution].)
All the activities the reader cites contribute to "name recognition" for a law firm, but the actual "sale" (read: engagements to handle a piece of litigation, a corporate transaction, a tax problem, etc.) only occurs when the client has the precise need, i.e., is at the point of pain. No one in the history of the world ever woke up and said, "What I need today is to buy myself a really good contract...."
The marketing of all sorts of other goods and services can often generate induced demand, simply by providing information about the features and benefits of a product. For example, a really good campaign could get me thinking about moving up to a Nikon digital SLR when my film Nikon still has many miles left on it, but you would never achieve anything remotely similar with a law firm's campaign.
To be sure, it's possible (although I would wager very uncommon) for a corporate lawyer to generate demand for, say, a review of corporate governance structures and policies at a client; but in general matrimonial lawyers don't generate divorces, white-collar crime lawyers don't generate securities fraud, and tax lawyers don't generate IRS audits. In this sense, then, all the marketing in the world can't generate a "sale" for a law firm. First, the client has to have the need.
But, as the marketers in the audience are starting to protest, can't the right marketing campaign achieve the holy grail of "differentiation?"
I'm here to tell you I think not.
Let me step back: Your firm can be "differentiated" in clients' eyes—and remember it's only the eyes of the clients that matter, not those of you and your partners—only if it stands for one consistent value, commonly thought of or referred to as its "brand." [ Note: Do not confuse "name recognition" for a "brand"—Martha Stewart has had very high name recognition for quite some time, but the value of the Martha Stewart brand has swung from the heights to the abyss and now maybe back.]
A "brand," in turn, is simply a promise: A promise of consistency, of a certain set of nearly immutable qualities that remains the same each time you come back. So every can of Coke is alike, every tube of Crest satisfies whatever it is in you that you like about Crest, and every BMW occupies the high-performance rung in its vehicle class.
But even though one of the most recognizable names in law-firm land is Skadden, every client interaction with a Skadden lawyer (or Clifford Chance, or Jacoby & Myers, for that matter) is different from every other client interaction with other Skadden lawyers, or that same Skadden lawyer on a different matter or a different day of the week.
In other words, law firms, even the mighty Skadden, cannot "promise" consistency. Thus they can't really have a brand that stands for anything in particular, and so they can't be meaningfully differentiated from their competitive set.
Understand what I'm not saying: I'm not saying that firms can't have reputations for being particularly expert in specific areas. Weil-Gotshal may be the go-to firm for big-ticket bankruptcies, Schulte-Roth for private equity, Sullivan & Cromwell for commercial bank regulation, etc.
That still doesn't mean the aura of those practice groups rubs off on completely unrelated practice groups within those exact same firms. In other words, if you're Fidelity or Vanguard and will never have anything to do with private equity, does anything still make Schulte-Roth distinctive to you? I think not.
But looking at these examples reveals something else: What clients want when they're in the market for a law firm is the capability that speaks most directly to their legal need du jour.
The only reason the articles, golf outings, fancy dinners, speaking engagements, etc., have any value is because they all amount to opportunities to show the client (you can't tell them—that's an exercise in futility if not self-inflicted humiliation) that you understand their business and the legal environment in which they function. In other words, they are efforts to demonstrate that what you offer could be, at the right time and place, germane to the client's legal needs.
The trenchant and always-reliable Bruce Marcus has written about this, more than once. The heart of the matter is this:
"The truth is, you probably can’t specifically articulate what you think you know to be better about you or your firm, because without tangible evidence, there’s no way to be credible. You can’t say, “We do better briefs and write better contracts,” or “We do better audits,” or “We’re better litigators.” "You can’t say these things because they’re outrageous and self-serving statements. Because you can’t prove it, in most cases. Because the Canons of Ethics won’t let you. And for most clients, because the real difference between one professional and another is not what you think it is – it’s what the client thinks it is."
Essentially, the goal of all the marketing tools we started with—the articles, the golf games and dinners, the speeches—is to create opportunities, through action not assertion, to demonstrate to the client that your firm stands ready to be truly useful when legal needs arise.
Marketing, in other words, gets you a seat at the consideration table. But you and your partners still have to "close the sale" in person.
And there won't be any "differentiation" or "branding" pixie dust in the room with you.Posted by Bruce at March 9, 2006 12:25 PM TrackBack
Sunday, March 12, 2006
Law is the latest in outsourcing to India
LegalEase featured in the Asian Age and Deccan Chronicle
With the world getting flatter, legal eagles in India, especially here, are fighting cases for US lawyers though not side by side. Legal outsourcing to India might have gained a foothold in the US legal system. Attorneys in Grand Forks and other companies now turn to lawyers in Bangalore, Delhi, and Chennai for help in drafting legal briefs and research work for cases to be fought in American courts.
Larry Newman, author of Texas Corporation Law and corporate transaction specialist, is similarly impressed by the quality of work done by Indian lawyers. He cites them as being instrumental to getting favourable results in even the most complex of cases. He is partial to legal outsourcing from India for the cost efficiency, fast response, and good work quality — all of which explain why the practice is fast catching up. Similarly, Tariq Akbar and Tariq Hafeez, partners of LegalEase Solutions in Michigan, US, discussed the impact of outsourcing and identified the potential of combining Mr Hafeez’s legal and Mr Akbar’s offshoring experience. They hire and retain both American and Indian lawyers to provide actual legal work to American law firms and corporate legal departments.
About a year ago, West — the best-known name in legal publishing in the US — began publicly ruminating about joining the stampede to India. For the past few months, West has been running a pilot programme in Mumbai, in which several Indian lawyers are preparing summaries of unpublished US court decisions.
General Electric (Research), America’s fifth-largest corporation, has taken the idea the farthest and set up a subsidiary in India that employs about 30 lawyers. In-house law departments of some multinational firms — DuPont, General Electric, United Technologies, Bayer, Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle and Sun — are here.
India has a huge potential in legal outsourcing, with the number of jobs in the field increasing to 79,000 by 2015, a study by Forrester has said. Though India had earned over $6.7 billion in US-based outsourcing services, such as software and call centres, till March 2005, the field of legal outsourcing was largely untapped.
The study estimated that jobs in the field — which was poised to increase dramatically from about $80 million annually to approximately $4 billion — would grow to 29,000 in 2008, 35,000 by 2010, and 79,000 by 2015.
Indian outsourcing offers the following economic advantages: a significant wage differential with Indian firms report paying legal researchers around $12,000 per year and also savings in perks, overhead, and working conditions, the study said, adding time zone differences allowed for overnight and 24x7 operations.
Says Mr Akbar, chief executive officer of LegalEase Solutions, "Our offshore attorneys in India are among the brightest in the legal community and are willing to direct their talents and energy towards providing some world class products. They have been extensively trained on US law and online tools like Lexis Nexis."
"This is because Indian lawyers are positioned to assist the US legal market," claimed Rocky Dhir, whose Atlas Legal Research has lawyers in Bangalore. "There is no difference between Indian and American advocates. The quality of work is the same," said attorney at law Jay Ethington, specialising in criminal defence.
A former assistant United States attorney, Mr Ethington said he had tried Indian advocates to do research and complete the paperwork for about half-a-dozen cases. "Results have been very good all the time," he said.
Indian advocates do not fight the case directly in US courts. Sitting thousands of miles away, they do the research work, analyse the case and draft the legal brief for advocates, who fight the case in US courts. This saves a lot of time and energy, besides money, for American attorneys.
The advantage is, Mr Dhir said, "India, like the US, has a common law jurisdiction." The fact that the entire legal system, from studies to debate to court orders, is conducted in English is also an advantage. Also, the time difference between India and the US is appropriate.
"While our legal research associates are busy preparing the case, US lawyers sleep. As such our company works 24 hours," Mr Dhir said. It would also be an added advantage for a large number of Indian companies, too, like Infosys, Tata and Wipro, who have business in the US, to access this legal facility. With the help of lawyers from India, these companies can very well compete with their rivals in courts here and that too at a fractional cost.
This proves that offshoring is benefiting both sides and Americans are opening up after much dissent. Agrees, Mr Akbar, "The practice of law requires court time, client development meetings and a certain amount of personal research and writing. You cannot replace an American attorney. We help American lawyers tap the intellectual capital of the world to meet the demands of the legal market through outsourcing. There are small law firms who could definitely use the affordable legal support and there are large ongoing expensive litigation cases (case in point Enron) which continue to consume millions of dollars which can be made a lot more cost effective."
So far, the legal services work consisted of paralegal, secretarial and litigation support. However, according to financial consulting firm Fulcrum Financial Inquiry, Indian firms now offered more valuable services, including contract review and monitoring, document review for due diligence, patent drafting, simple filings and legal research.
According to a report published last year by the University of California at Berkeley, paralegals and legal assistants based in India earn on an average between $6 and $8 an hour, compared with the nearly $18 an hour their counterparts in the US make. "But it is more than what a lawyer in India would make. I took up working for an outsourcing firm because the money is definitely double," says Ms Nadini Pai, a lawyer in an outsourcing firm in the city.
Will this boom in India too fizz out like the dotcom boom did? "The boom will have to level out as with everything else. There is a demand supply logic which commands the world economy. Once the demand and supply levels off, the boom will subside but the need will continue. BPO is not an industry per se but a concept which will cease to be an attention grabber but more of the norm of things to come as the world continues to get flatter," says Mr Akbar.
- By Raziqueh Hussain
With the world getting flatter, legal eagles in India, especially here, are fighting cases for US lawyers though not side by side. Legal outsourcing to India might have gained a foothold in the US legal system. Attorneys in Grand Forks and other companies now turn to lawyers in Bangalore, Delhi, and Chennai for help in drafting legal briefs and research work for cases to be fought in American courts.
Larry Newman, author of Texas Corporation Law and corporate transaction specialist, is similarly impressed by the quality of work done by Indian lawyers. He cites them as being instrumental to getting favourable results in even the most complex of cases. He is partial to legal outsourcing from India for the cost efficiency, fast response, and good work quality — all of which explain why the practice is fast catching up. Similarly, Tariq Akbar and Tariq Hafeez, partners of LegalEase Solutions in Michigan, US, discussed the impact of outsourcing and identified the potential of combining Mr Hafeez’s legal and Mr Akbar’s offshoring experience. They hire and retain both American and Indian lawyers to provide actual legal work to American law firms and corporate legal departments.
About a year ago, West — the best-known name in legal publishing in the US — began publicly ruminating about joining the stampede to India. For the past few months, West has been running a pilot programme in Mumbai, in which several Indian lawyers are preparing summaries of unpublished US court decisions.
General Electric (Research), America’s fifth-largest corporation, has taken the idea the farthest and set up a subsidiary in India that employs about 30 lawyers. In-house law departments of some multinational firms — DuPont, General Electric, United Technologies, Bayer, Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle and Sun — are here.
India has a huge potential in legal outsourcing, with the number of jobs in the field increasing to 79,000 by 2015, a study by Forrester has said. Though India had earned over $6.7 billion in US-based outsourcing services, such as software and call centres, till March 2005, the field of legal outsourcing was largely untapped.
The study estimated that jobs in the field — which was poised to increase dramatically from about $80 million annually to approximately $4 billion — would grow to 29,000 in 2008, 35,000 by 2010, and 79,000 by 2015.
Indian outsourcing offers the following economic advantages: a significant wage differential with Indian firms report paying legal researchers around $12,000 per year and also savings in perks, overhead, and working conditions, the study said, adding time zone differences allowed for overnight and 24x7 operations.
Says Mr Akbar, chief executive officer of LegalEase Solutions, "Our offshore attorneys in India are among the brightest in the legal community and are willing to direct their talents and energy towards providing some world class products. They have been extensively trained on US law and online tools like Lexis Nexis."
"This is because Indian lawyers are positioned to assist the US legal market," claimed Rocky Dhir, whose Atlas Legal Research has lawyers in Bangalore. "There is no difference between Indian and American advocates. The quality of work is the same," said attorney at law Jay Ethington, specialising in criminal defence.
A former assistant United States attorney, Mr Ethington said he had tried Indian advocates to do research and complete the paperwork for about half-a-dozen cases. "Results have been very good all the time," he said.
Indian advocates do not fight the case directly in US courts. Sitting thousands of miles away, they do the research work, analyse the case and draft the legal brief for advocates, who fight the case in US courts. This saves a lot of time and energy, besides money, for American attorneys.
The advantage is, Mr Dhir said, "India, like the US, has a common law jurisdiction." The fact that the entire legal system, from studies to debate to court orders, is conducted in English is also an advantage. Also, the time difference between India and the US is appropriate.
"While our legal research associates are busy preparing the case, US lawyers sleep. As such our company works 24 hours," Mr Dhir said. It would also be an added advantage for a large number of Indian companies, too, like Infosys, Tata and Wipro, who have business in the US, to access this legal facility. With the help of lawyers from India, these companies can very well compete with their rivals in courts here and that too at a fractional cost.
This proves that offshoring is benefiting both sides and Americans are opening up after much dissent. Agrees, Mr Akbar, "The practice of law requires court time, client development meetings and a certain amount of personal research and writing. You cannot replace an American attorney. We help American lawyers tap the intellectual capital of the world to meet the demands of the legal market through outsourcing. There are small law firms who could definitely use the affordable legal support and there are large ongoing expensive litigation cases (case in point Enron) which continue to consume millions of dollars which can be made a lot more cost effective."
So far, the legal services work consisted of paralegal, secretarial and litigation support. However, according to financial consulting firm Fulcrum Financial Inquiry, Indian firms now offered more valuable services, including contract review and monitoring, document review for due diligence, patent drafting, simple filings and legal research.
According to a report published last year by the University of California at Berkeley, paralegals and legal assistants based in India earn on an average between $6 and $8 an hour, compared with the nearly $18 an hour their counterparts in the US make. "But it is more than what a lawyer in India would make. I took up working for an outsourcing firm because the money is definitely double," says Ms Nadini Pai, a lawyer in an outsourcing firm in the city.
Will this boom in India too fizz out like the dotcom boom did? "The boom will have to level out as with everything else. There is a demand supply logic which commands the world economy. Once the demand and supply levels off, the boom will subside but the need will continue. BPO is not an industry per se but a concept which will cease to be an attention grabber but more of the norm of things to come as the world continues to get flatter," says Mr Akbar.
- By Raziqueh Hussain
Wednesday, February 22, 2006
The outsourcing wave hits investment bankers
Watch out--the outsourcing bug has bit the financial industry, namely the behemoths of the likes of JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley. Not only are back office functions being outsourced to India, but more and more, high-end analytical research and overseeing foreign-exchange trades and complicated credit derivatives contracts.
The outsourcing wave hits investment bankers
It's not just IT support anymore. Banks increasingly are taking their research analysis operations abroad -- and deal-making may be next.
By Shaheen Pasha, CNNMoney.com staff writer
February 22, 2006: 9:45 AM EST
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) - First came IT outsourcing. Now comes investment banking.
After years of outsourcing technology support and other back-office operations to countries like India and China, financial institutions are increasingly looking to move large portions of their investment banking operations abroad, according to a recent report by Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu.
Faced with a dearth of skilled workers and shrinking profit margins, banks that want to remain competitive in the global marketplace can't afford to miss out on high-quality -- and cheaper -- foreign talent, the report said.
As a result, what began as technology support is now morphing into more analytic operations.
"Most of the large financial institutions were in the IT side of outsourcing but as they leveraged that experience, they got more interested" in moving more of their investment banking and research activities abroad, said Niket Patankar, chief executive of outsourcing firm Adventity Inc.
Among the leaders in outsourcing and offshoring are the big investment banks: Citigroup (Research), Morgan Stanley (Research), Lehman Brothers (Research) and JPMorgan Chase (Research). Typically, those banks have moved their research analysis operations offshore in order to take advantage of the time difference between the U.S. and Asia as well as the cheaper labor.
"Investment banking has a lot of number crunching that to a large degree can be done anywhere," said Alenka Grealish, manager of the banking group at Celent LLC. "By taking press releases and data feeds and digesting them offshore, the components can be made into basic analyst reports" that are available to clients early in the morning.
Going one step further JPMorgan Chase, however, is taking its investment banking activities abroad a step further. The company was one of the first investment banks to not only transfer the company's back-office and call-center operations but to also hire research analysts in India, Hong Kong and Singapore to complement its U.S.-based research team. After piloting the program in 2003 with about 1,200 employees in India, the company announced late last year that it plans to have a total of 9,000 employees in India by the end of 2007, with one-third of those employees working for the company's investment banking unit. Not only will the Indian workers handle research and analysis for the bank but will also be responsible for its foreign exchange trades and its highly complicated credit derivatives contracts.
Some experts expect that as banks become more comfortable with their offshore operations and foreign talent becomes more attuned to the companies' way of doing business, financial institutions may even shift some deal-making responsibility onto its foreign employees.
The Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu report indicated that offshore operations give financial services companies a foothold in new and emerging markets such as China, where there are more revenue opportunites than mature markets like the U.S. The report also predicts that driven by the need to take aggressive cost-cutting measures, the financial services industry will move 20 percent of its total costs base offshore by the end of 2010, compared to the current average of 3.5 percent.
Although no numbers are yet available, Peter Lowes, principle and head of outsourcing advisory services at Deloitte Consulting LLP, said in a few years, banks may increasingly rely on offshore talent to conduct due diligence and to screen prospective clients for investment banking business.
And while there is no single, authoritative source on the specific number of U.S. investment banking jobs that could be lost to offshoring, Forrester Research predicts that within 10 years, at least 3.3 million U.S. jobs across industries will be shipped to lower-cost and developing countries such India, China and the Phillipines.
A competitive necessity
"I believe the industry has reached such a level of globalization that it matters less and less where the actual (research) is generated and matters more what the cost of generating those products are" said Richard Bove, analyst at Punk Ziegel & Co. "Banks can't afford not to do (outsourcing) anymore."
It takes about three years for banks to see full benefits from an offshoring program, said Deloitte's Lowes, as companies overcome the initial learning curve of doing business abroad and gradually build their scale. Firms that aggressively expand their scope and scale will deliver much higher returns on the foreign investments than those that simply dabble in the practice, he said. Top performers can see cost savings of up to 60 percent while bottom performers report savings of less than 20 percent, Lowes said.
Lowes added that those companies that reinvest some of their cost savings towards continuing to expand their operations offshore are going to be the true long-term winners.
"The economics (of offshoring in banking) are strong and the risks are being successfully mitigated" he said. "Today it's a competitive necessity."
The outsourcing wave hits investment bankers
It's not just IT support anymore. Banks increasingly are taking their research analysis operations abroad -- and deal-making may be next.
By Shaheen Pasha, CNNMoney.com staff writer
February 22, 2006: 9:45 AM EST
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) - First came IT outsourcing. Now comes investment banking.
After years of outsourcing technology support and other back-office operations to countries like India and China, financial institutions are increasingly looking to move large portions of their investment banking operations abroad, according to a recent report by Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu.
Faced with a dearth of skilled workers and shrinking profit margins, banks that want to remain competitive in the global marketplace can't afford to miss out on high-quality -- and cheaper -- foreign talent, the report said.
As a result, what began as technology support is now morphing into more analytic operations.
"Most of the large financial institutions were in the IT side of outsourcing but as they leveraged that experience, they got more interested" in moving more of their investment banking and research activities abroad, said Niket Patankar, chief executive of outsourcing firm Adventity Inc.
Among the leaders in outsourcing and offshoring are the big investment banks: Citigroup (Research), Morgan Stanley (Research), Lehman Brothers (Research) and JPMorgan Chase (Research). Typically, those banks have moved their research analysis operations offshore in order to take advantage of the time difference between the U.S. and Asia as well as the cheaper labor.
"Investment banking has a lot of number crunching that to a large degree can be done anywhere," said Alenka Grealish, manager of the banking group at Celent LLC. "By taking press releases and data feeds and digesting them offshore, the components can be made into basic analyst reports" that are available to clients early in the morning.
Going one step further JPMorgan Chase, however, is taking its investment banking activities abroad a step further. The company was one of the first investment banks to not only transfer the company's back-office and call-center operations but to also hire research analysts in India, Hong Kong and Singapore to complement its U.S.-based research team. After piloting the program in 2003 with about 1,200 employees in India, the company announced late last year that it plans to have a total of 9,000 employees in India by the end of 2007, with one-third of those employees working for the company's investment banking unit. Not only will the Indian workers handle research and analysis for the bank but will also be responsible for its foreign exchange trades and its highly complicated credit derivatives contracts.
Some experts expect that as banks become more comfortable with their offshore operations and foreign talent becomes more attuned to the companies' way of doing business, financial institutions may even shift some deal-making responsibility onto its foreign employees.
The Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu report indicated that offshore operations give financial services companies a foothold in new and emerging markets such as China, where there are more revenue opportunites than mature markets like the U.S. The report also predicts that driven by the need to take aggressive cost-cutting measures, the financial services industry will move 20 percent of its total costs base offshore by the end of 2010, compared to the current average of 3.5 percent.
Although no numbers are yet available, Peter Lowes, principle and head of outsourcing advisory services at Deloitte Consulting LLP, said in a few years, banks may increasingly rely on offshore talent to conduct due diligence and to screen prospective clients for investment banking business.
And while there is no single, authoritative source on the specific number of U.S. investment banking jobs that could be lost to offshoring, Forrester Research predicts that within 10 years, at least 3.3 million U.S. jobs across industries will be shipped to lower-cost and developing countries such India, China and the Phillipines.
A competitive necessity
"I believe the industry has reached such a level of globalization that it matters less and less where the actual (research) is generated and matters more what the cost of generating those products are" said Richard Bove, analyst at Punk Ziegel & Co. "Banks can't afford not to do (outsourcing) anymore."
It takes about three years for banks to see full benefits from an offshoring program, said Deloitte's Lowes, as companies overcome the initial learning curve of doing business abroad and gradually build their scale. Firms that aggressively expand their scope and scale will deliver much higher returns on the foreign investments than those that simply dabble in the practice, he said. Top performers can see cost savings of up to 60 percent while bottom performers report savings of less than 20 percent, Lowes said.
Lowes added that those companies that reinvest some of their cost savings towards continuing to expand their operations offshore are going to be the true long-term winners.
"The economics (of offshoring in banking) are strong and the risks are being successfully mitigated" he said. "Today it's a competitive necessity."
Wednesday, February 15, 2006
Litigation Budgeting Helps In-House Counsel Control Costs
Having spoken to a number of general counsel over the past few months, its easily apparrent that litigation costs are among the top concerns of in-house counsel. Not only the sheer cost of litigation, but also the unpredictability of costs is unsettling at best for general counsel. We did speak to a few general counsel who have actively kept their outside counsel on a budget. One in-house lawyer, a director of litigation for a Fortune 100 company, explained that he bid out legal work to law firms, and awarded the work to the firm with the best value. Moreover, he kept his outside counsel on budget.
This practice of budgeting litigation is certainly the way to go for general counsel. While you may never be comfortable with the high cost of litigation, with legal budgeting, you need not lose sleep over the final bill.
Litigation Budgeting: No Crystal Ball RequiredDavid J. LevyThe Corporate CounselorFebruary 15, 2006
Litigation may be simply one of the costs of doing business, but it's no secret that the difficulty in predicting those costs adds to the frustration in corporate legal departments. Concerns about costs and how to control or predict them weave their way throughout a survey of corporate litigation trends commissioned for the second consecutive year by Fulbright & Jaworski, and conducted by an independent research firm. (The 2005 survey was comprised of written responses from 354 in-house attorneys, including 50 in the United Kingdom. Most of the respondents held the title of General Counsel, Legal Director or a similar senior-level position in their respective legal departments.) This article discusses one of the most effective, yet surprisingly underutilized tools for managing litigation costs: the litigation budget from outside counsel.
A RECURRENT THEME: COSTS, COSTS, COSTS
Even when not directly addressed in the survey questions, the survey participants often injected the subject of litigation costs into their answers. For example, when asked for specific examples of their top litigation concerns, nearly one in five mentioned the costs of litigation as one of their top concerns rather than any specific type of litigation. In fact, costs were among the top two concerns mentioned across all eight industries that were represented in the survey. And litigation costs ate up the biggest chunk of the total corporate legal budget in the manufacturing, energy and insurance industries.
It is not surprising, then, that "cost efficiency" was ranked second only to "results" among the criteria used in measuring the success of legal departments, as well as that of individual attorneys in the department. Survey participants also expected more litigation and rising costs in the future. Participants, therefore, want future surveys to continue to inquire about ways that corporate legal departments are trying to manage and reduce litigation costs.
In fact, when asked for the one message they would like to deliver to their outside counsel, the most frequent answer involved "controlling costs." The verbatim answers ranged from the metaphorical ("Sharpen your pencil"), to the direct ("Cut your fees"), to the diplomatic ("Be very careful in your billing practices and keep legal fees as reasonable as possible"). Others emphasized the need to be updated regularly on costs ("Keep me informed of your day-to-day activities so that I am better able to estimate costs" and "Communicate with us, let us know how we are doing"). And when asked what one phrase they most hate hearing from their law firm, the answer often centered on cost surprises ("Sorry, we have gone over budget," "It cost more than we expected") and uncertainty ("Can't estimate the costs").
However phrased, the answer across industries, geographic regions and size of companies was clear: Litigation costs -- and especially the unpleasant surprises from them are an ongoing source of tension between clients and outside counsel.
E-DISCOVERY COSTS AND LIABILITIES
Adding to the dilemma of cost control is the fact that a growing component of litigation costs — and one that needs careful consideration in budgeting -- is electronic discovery. To be sure, the initial estimates from outside firms for document collection and management process may often sound reasonable (e.g., $2000 per gigabyte, or $200 per hour). But in a complex matter, that bill may quickly soar to six figures, or even seven, especially after adding per-page charges for putting documents into a database, converting them to appropriate file formats, producing them and other related charges. Indeed, in large cases, seven-figure e-discovery costs are not uncommon -- especially if the costs are not properly managed.
Thus, particularly in class actions, multi-district litigations, patent litigation cases and other complicated, document-intensive cases, clients need to closely examine their outside law firms' capabilities and experience in creating and managing the electronic discovery process. This includes the ability to most efficiently and effectively use document repositories and otherwise handle document production. If they do not have sufficient experience, they may not achieve the cost control or predictability that clients want.
Companies can also have a hand in reducing their e-discovery costs. Those corporations that have established an internal procedure for locating, organizing and producing documents without the need for outside help can save substantial amounts of money. This may be beyond the bandwidth of smaller legal departments, but it can be an important cost saver for companies with the legal infrastructure to do it.
However, even small companies can save money by taking a proactive approach in their normal business operations with written record retention policies and litigation hold policies designed for today's electronic data world. Hanging over the process of e-discovery, of course, is the threat of spoliation (intentional destruction of, or failure to preserve, evidence for pending or reasonably foreseeable litigation). Spoliation can have a major impact on the outcome of a case, since one of the possible sanctions is an instruction from the judge to infer that the "destroyed" documents in question would have been adverse to the party's case. Other sanctions, ranging from monetary fines to striking of all pleadings can also have disastrous consequences and cause a case to turn on how it was handled, as opposed to the underlying facts and laws.
The cost of not being well prepared at all times for litigation in the management of information has been demonstrated in several high-profile cases in recent years. The notorious labor/employment case, Zubulake v. UBS Warburg LLC, resulted in a $28 million jury award and a series of rulings by the judge outlining more clearly the duty-to-preserve responsibilities and actions that both in-house and outside counsel should take to meet them. Last year's finding of document/data destruction in Coleman v. Morgan Stanley was part of the reason for the approximately $1.5 billion damages award. In both cases, and others, the failure or inability of companies to produce all of the documents subpoenaed in a timely manner contributed significantly to the negative outcome of the case.
The good news is that the survey findings showed that companies are getting the message. Three-quarters of the companies in the survey had litigation hold policies in place, and 45 percent of those had revised their policies in the past year. The same was true with written records retention policies where 82 percent of the total sample had policies and 62 percent of those companies had revised their policies in the past year. The high level of revisions probably indicates an appreciation that electronic discovery is a rapidly changing area of the law and requires close monitoring.
Litigation hold policies, however, do not help to control costs. Indeed, the Catch-22 is that the preservation of vast amounts of data for litigation is more likely to increase not only the litigation costs, but also their unpredictability.
BUDGETING: SOLUTION, NOT PROBLEM
Despite the obvious cost concerns, the Litigation Trends Survey showed that efforts to predict and manage litigation costs are sketchy, at best, in the corporate world. Surprisingly, just 37 percent of the companies in the survey require a budget from their outside law firms for all their litigation matters; and only another 11 percent require budgets more than half of the time. (Tracking time-to-resolution for litigation matters is another practice that is apparently far from universal. Although 22 percent of the sample said they always track time-to-resolution, more than half never do it.)
It is certainly true that unforeseen events occur over the course of a matter, and no one has perfect vision when looking out 12 to 24 months, or more, into the future. Still, experienced litigators -- and in-house attorneys -- can draw on their collective experiences in projecting what tasks will need to be performed and estimating how many attorney hours will be required for each task, what the expenses for each task will be, and how long each "phase" of the case will last — if only they would take the time to really focus on it. Working together, outside and in-house counsel can therefore formulate budgets and make the relevant assumptions with reasonable accuracy, as long as they are methodical in going through each stage of litigation and the steps they entail.
Counsel should be able to estimate, for example, the attorneys who will be needed, their levels (partner, senior associate, associate), and their respective rates. Counsel should also be able to estimate the approximate volume of documents that will be involved, the number of fact witnesses and expert witnesses who will need to be interviewed and deposed, the number of deposition hours required, when they will begin taking depositions, when they will file non-dispositive and/or dispositive motions, and so on throughout the duration of the matter. It is simply a matter of using past experience and methodical analysis to break the case down into its parts, then estimate the costs and relevant time period for each part.
For example, in a breach of contract case, counsel might estimate that a partner and associate will interview a key employee/fact witness for eight hours, then later prepare the witness for her deposition for six hours and then have the partner present the witness for deposition for six hours. By simply multiplying the hourly rates of the partner and associate by the number of projected hours they will spend interviewing, then preparing, then presenting the witness -- counsel can calculate the budget for this aspect of the case.
SIMPLE TOOLS HELP
Regardless of all the various software products being marketed for litigation budgeting, they are only as good as the information that is input into them. Simple Excel spreadsheets that break a budget down into key tasks and phases of a case work perfectly well. For example, using the ABA task codes can be an excellent way of focusing on all the steps in the litigation process. And by using the formulas in Excel, counsel can easily modify the budget by adjusting one or move variables (e.g., attorney's hourly rate, or estimate time spent on a task), which will then adjust the other variables and figures, as necessary.
Some budgeting tools incorporate deadlines and the ability to look at previous work in analyzing costs and budgeting future items. Of course, people will inevitably record some functions differently, which may put certain tasks over-budget and others under; and the inherent unpredictability of litigation can always cause events to be delayed, pushed up, short-circuited or extended. But just because budgets are not perfect, that is no reason not to use them. If nothing else, they force counsel to think hard about the time and resources committed to a case.
Indeed, it's very much like doing a family budget. When expenses approach budget limits, it's time for lower-cost alternatives, such as sending an associate -- instead of a partner -- to a meeting or deposition (when appropriate). Time-and-expense tracking and promptly notifying the client when costs begin to bump up against the budget is the way to reduce those unpleasant surprises that can harm counsel-client relationships.
Any relationship, however, is a two-way street, making it important for in-house and outside counsel to agree on their expectations of what constitutes a "fair" budget. Will the budget become a de facto, maximum-fee arrangement? What happens if outside counsel is too far under or over budget? How will that be handled internally, and how will it be handled with outside counsel? No one can predict the future with complete accuracy, but they can establish guidelines of fairness and protocols for what to do when estimates are significantly off the mark.
Finally, a modest proposal to corporate legal departments: Offer to pay for outside counsel's time spent preparing a budget. Have that time included in the budget and offer to work with outside counsel in preparing a thorough, carefully considered budget. That will help make the point that budgeting is important to the client, as is continuous communication about any needed ad-justments to it as the matter progresses.
If both outside counsel and client approach litigation budgeting in a methodical way, drawing on their respective personal and institutional experiences, then litigation budgeting shouldn't require any clairvoyance or pain medication. And in-house attorneys responsible for their own legal department's budget will finally be able to sleep at night.
David Levy is a partner in the litigation, international, and intellectual property and technology departments at Fulbright & Jaworski. He is also the co-chair of the firm's firm's Asia Pacific Practice Group. Levy focuses his domestic and international trial practice on complex litigation matters that range from class actions to patent infringement cases.
This practice of budgeting litigation is certainly the way to go for general counsel. While you may never be comfortable with the high cost of litigation, with legal budgeting, you need not lose sleep over the final bill.
Litigation Budgeting: No Crystal Ball RequiredDavid J. LevyThe Corporate CounselorFebruary 15, 2006
Litigation may be simply one of the costs of doing business, but it's no secret that the difficulty in predicting those costs adds to the frustration in corporate legal departments. Concerns about costs and how to control or predict them weave their way throughout a survey of corporate litigation trends commissioned for the second consecutive year by Fulbright & Jaworski, and conducted by an independent research firm. (The 2005 survey was comprised of written responses from 354 in-house attorneys, including 50 in the United Kingdom. Most of the respondents held the title of General Counsel, Legal Director or a similar senior-level position in their respective legal departments.) This article discusses one of the most effective, yet surprisingly underutilized tools for managing litigation costs: the litigation budget from outside counsel.
A RECURRENT THEME: COSTS, COSTS, COSTS
Even when not directly addressed in the survey questions, the survey participants often injected the subject of litigation costs into their answers. For example, when asked for specific examples of their top litigation concerns, nearly one in five mentioned the costs of litigation as one of their top concerns rather than any specific type of litigation. In fact, costs were among the top two concerns mentioned across all eight industries that were represented in the survey. And litigation costs ate up the biggest chunk of the total corporate legal budget in the manufacturing, energy and insurance industries.
It is not surprising, then, that "cost efficiency" was ranked second only to "results" among the criteria used in measuring the success of legal departments, as well as that of individual attorneys in the department. Survey participants also expected more litigation and rising costs in the future. Participants, therefore, want future surveys to continue to inquire about ways that corporate legal departments are trying to manage and reduce litigation costs.
In fact, when asked for the one message they would like to deliver to their outside counsel, the most frequent answer involved "controlling costs." The verbatim answers ranged from the metaphorical ("Sharpen your pencil"), to the direct ("Cut your fees"), to the diplomatic ("Be very careful in your billing practices and keep legal fees as reasonable as possible"). Others emphasized the need to be updated regularly on costs ("Keep me informed of your day-to-day activities so that I am better able to estimate costs" and "Communicate with us, let us know how we are doing"). And when asked what one phrase they most hate hearing from their law firm, the answer often centered on cost surprises ("Sorry, we have gone over budget," "It cost more than we expected") and uncertainty ("Can't estimate the costs").
However phrased, the answer across industries, geographic regions and size of companies was clear: Litigation costs -- and especially the unpleasant surprises from them are an ongoing source of tension between clients and outside counsel.
E-DISCOVERY COSTS AND LIABILITIES
Adding to the dilemma of cost control is the fact that a growing component of litigation costs — and one that needs careful consideration in budgeting -- is electronic discovery. To be sure, the initial estimates from outside firms for document collection and management process may often sound reasonable (e.g., $2000 per gigabyte, or $200 per hour). But in a complex matter, that bill may quickly soar to six figures, or even seven, especially after adding per-page charges for putting documents into a database, converting them to appropriate file formats, producing them and other related charges. Indeed, in large cases, seven-figure e-discovery costs are not uncommon -- especially if the costs are not properly managed.
Thus, particularly in class actions, multi-district litigations, patent litigation cases and other complicated, document-intensive cases, clients need to closely examine their outside law firms' capabilities and experience in creating and managing the electronic discovery process. This includes the ability to most efficiently and effectively use document repositories and otherwise handle document production. If they do not have sufficient experience, they may not achieve the cost control or predictability that clients want.
Companies can also have a hand in reducing their e-discovery costs. Those corporations that have established an internal procedure for locating, organizing and producing documents without the need for outside help can save substantial amounts of money. This may be beyond the bandwidth of smaller legal departments, but it can be an important cost saver for companies with the legal infrastructure to do it.
However, even small companies can save money by taking a proactive approach in their normal business operations with written record retention policies and litigation hold policies designed for today's electronic data world. Hanging over the process of e-discovery, of course, is the threat of spoliation (intentional destruction of, or failure to preserve, evidence for pending or reasonably foreseeable litigation). Spoliation can have a major impact on the outcome of a case, since one of the possible sanctions is an instruction from the judge to infer that the "destroyed" documents in question would have been adverse to the party's case. Other sanctions, ranging from monetary fines to striking of all pleadings can also have disastrous consequences and cause a case to turn on how it was handled, as opposed to the underlying facts and laws.
The cost of not being well prepared at all times for litigation in the management of information has been demonstrated in several high-profile cases in recent years. The notorious labor/employment case, Zubulake v. UBS Warburg LLC, resulted in a $28 million jury award and a series of rulings by the judge outlining more clearly the duty-to-preserve responsibilities and actions that both in-house and outside counsel should take to meet them. Last year's finding of document/data destruction in Coleman v. Morgan Stanley was part of the reason for the approximately $1.5 billion damages award. In both cases, and others, the failure or inability of companies to produce all of the documents subpoenaed in a timely manner contributed significantly to the negative outcome of the case.
The good news is that the survey findings showed that companies are getting the message. Three-quarters of the companies in the survey had litigation hold policies in place, and 45 percent of those had revised their policies in the past year. The same was true with written records retention policies where 82 percent of the total sample had policies and 62 percent of those companies had revised their policies in the past year. The high level of revisions probably indicates an appreciation that electronic discovery is a rapidly changing area of the law and requires close monitoring.
Litigation hold policies, however, do not help to control costs. Indeed, the Catch-22 is that the preservation of vast amounts of data for litigation is more likely to increase not only the litigation costs, but also their unpredictability.
BUDGETING: SOLUTION, NOT PROBLEM
Despite the obvious cost concerns, the Litigation Trends Survey showed that efforts to predict and manage litigation costs are sketchy, at best, in the corporate world. Surprisingly, just 37 percent of the companies in the survey require a budget from their outside law firms for all their litigation matters; and only another 11 percent require budgets more than half of the time. (Tracking time-to-resolution for litigation matters is another practice that is apparently far from universal. Although 22 percent of the sample said they always track time-to-resolution, more than half never do it.)
It is certainly true that unforeseen events occur over the course of a matter, and no one has perfect vision when looking out 12 to 24 months, or more, into the future. Still, experienced litigators -- and in-house attorneys -- can draw on their collective experiences in projecting what tasks will need to be performed and estimating how many attorney hours will be required for each task, what the expenses for each task will be, and how long each "phase" of the case will last — if only they would take the time to really focus on it. Working together, outside and in-house counsel can therefore formulate budgets and make the relevant assumptions with reasonable accuracy, as long as they are methodical in going through each stage of litigation and the steps they entail.
Counsel should be able to estimate, for example, the attorneys who will be needed, their levels (partner, senior associate, associate), and their respective rates. Counsel should also be able to estimate the approximate volume of documents that will be involved, the number of fact witnesses and expert witnesses who will need to be interviewed and deposed, the number of deposition hours required, when they will begin taking depositions, when they will file non-dispositive and/or dispositive motions, and so on throughout the duration of the matter. It is simply a matter of using past experience and methodical analysis to break the case down into its parts, then estimate the costs and relevant time period for each part.
For example, in a breach of contract case, counsel might estimate that a partner and associate will interview a key employee/fact witness for eight hours, then later prepare the witness for her deposition for six hours and then have the partner present the witness for deposition for six hours. By simply multiplying the hourly rates of the partner and associate by the number of projected hours they will spend interviewing, then preparing, then presenting the witness -- counsel can calculate the budget for this aspect of the case.
SIMPLE TOOLS HELP
Regardless of all the various software products being marketed for litigation budgeting, they are only as good as the information that is input into them. Simple Excel spreadsheets that break a budget down into key tasks and phases of a case work perfectly well. For example, using the ABA task codes can be an excellent way of focusing on all the steps in the litigation process. And by using the formulas in Excel, counsel can easily modify the budget by adjusting one or move variables (e.g., attorney's hourly rate, or estimate time spent on a task), which will then adjust the other variables and figures, as necessary.
Some budgeting tools incorporate deadlines and the ability to look at previous work in analyzing costs and budgeting future items. Of course, people will inevitably record some functions differently, which may put certain tasks over-budget and others under; and the inherent unpredictability of litigation can always cause events to be delayed, pushed up, short-circuited or extended. But just because budgets are not perfect, that is no reason not to use them. If nothing else, they force counsel to think hard about the time and resources committed to a case.
Indeed, it's very much like doing a family budget. When expenses approach budget limits, it's time for lower-cost alternatives, such as sending an associate -- instead of a partner -- to a meeting or deposition (when appropriate). Time-and-expense tracking and promptly notifying the client when costs begin to bump up against the budget is the way to reduce those unpleasant surprises that can harm counsel-client relationships.
Any relationship, however, is a two-way street, making it important for in-house and outside counsel to agree on their expectations of what constitutes a "fair" budget. Will the budget become a de facto, maximum-fee arrangement? What happens if outside counsel is too far under or over budget? How will that be handled internally, and how will it be handled with outside counsel? No one can predict the future with complete accuracy, but they can establish guidelines of fairness and protocols for what to do when estimates are significantly off the mark.
Finally, a modest proposal to corporate legal departments: Offer to pay for outside counsel's time spent preparing a budget. Have that time included in the budget and offer to work with outside counsel in preparing a thorough, carefully considered budget. That will help make the point that budgeting is important to the client, as is continuous communication about any needed ad-justments to it as the matter progresses.
If both outside counsel and client approach litigation budgeting in a methodical way, drawing on their respective personal and institutional experiences, then litigation budgeting shouldn't require any clairvoyance or pain medication. And in-house attorneys responsible for their own legal department's budget will finally be able to sleep at night.
David Levy is a partner in the litigation, international, and intellectual property and technology departments at Fulbright & Jaworski. He is also the co-chair of the firm's firm's Asia Pacific Practice Group. Levy focuses his domestic and international trial practice on complex litigation matters that range from class actions to patent infringement cases.
Thursday, February 09, 2006
Legal Outsourcing Taps into 'intellectual capital'
LegalEase Solutions featured in the front pages of the Detroit Legal News
B CHRISTINE L. MOBLEY Legal News Legal outsourcing has been profiled as an easy way for attorneys, law firms, and even large Fortune 500 companies to save not only money but time as well. Michigan is home to three fledgling legal outsourcing firms. Among these outsourcing service providers is LegalEase Solutions L.L.C. According to Tariq Akbar, CEO of LegalEase Solutions L.L.C., the company began in 2004 and has three offices worldwide: one in Canton, Mich. and two others in Cochin and Chennai, India. One advantage to legal outsourcing would be that projects could be done in a more time efficient manner. “With a company like ours — where we do a third of the work here in the United States, and the rest of it is done offshore — you virtually have a 24-hour workforce,” Tariq Hafeez, LegalEase Solutions L.L.C. president and general counsel, said. “Basically, around 10 p.m. here, in Michigan, is 8 o’clock in the morning in India, so we can have our attorneys working here until 5 or 6 p.m. in Michigan and then after a four hour gap, the work is picked up again in India. So we can get large projects done, or even short projects done; at a much shorter time than it would take otherwise.” According to the LegalEase Solutions Web site, once a client has contacted LegalEase Solutions and their information is collected, the information is transferred over to lawyers in India, the project is then researched and prepared and reviewed, and then given back to the client for their review and use of the product. The India-based attorneys have access to Lexis Nexis and other online research tools in order to complete projects from any jurisdiction, according to the site, and India-based legal professionals must have a minimum of five years experience before being hired by LegalEase Solutions.
“The people we’re working with are truly some of the smartest and brightest people we have met internationally;’ Akbar said. “These are really smart, creative, and talented people and what we’re doing is tapping into their intellectual capital. You’re actually tapping into this huge, vast resource of the rest of the world who are willing to direct their creative talents, their minds towards making the entire legal industry a little more efficient.”
“Lawyers have just begun to realize that outsourcing can benefit them just as outsourcing has benefited other industries in the United States,” Hafeez said. There may be those that are concerned or unwilling to turn to legal outsourcing for fear of displacement, however, Akbar disagrees and believes that legal outsourcing is not only a “new trend” but “it’s becoming a necessity” “So much of the law is not just sitting at a desk writing and researching — so much of it is actually active negotiation, face-to-face contact, being in court, and none of that is going to be threatened by outsourcing,” Hafeez agreed. “What we serve to do is make the process a lot more efficient:’ Akbar said. “Nearly all kinds of law firms and legal departments can use our services in some capacity,” Akbar noted. “Our main clients today are firms with a lot of litigation work who need the litigation support and corporate legal departments who are interested in cutting costs and keeping some work in-house.” “This is probably a good time for lawyers and law firms to try legal outsourcing out because a company like ours is really willing to engineer our processes around our clients. If we have a client who wants things done in a very specific way — we’ll make sure to do it that way because were new enough and we want to’ bring on. as much clientele as possible,” Hafeez said. “We don’t even invoice our clients until they are satisfied with our work, so it’s really a no risk proposition.” For more information on LegalEase Solutions L.L.C., call1-866-534-6177 or visit their Web site at wwwiegaleasesolutions.com.
B CHRISTINE L. MOBLEY Legal News Legal outsourcing has been profiled as an easy way for attorneys, law firms, and even large Fortune 500 companies to save not only money but time as well. Michigan is home to three fledgling legal outsourcing firms. Among these outsourcing service providers is LegalEase Solutions L.L.C. According to Tariq Akbar, CEO of LegalEase Solutions L.L.C., the company began in 2004 and has three offices worldwide: one in Canton, Mich. and two others in Cochin and Chennai, India. One advantage to legal outsourcing would be that projects could be done in a more time efficient manner. “With a company like ours — where we do a third of the work here in the United States, and the rest of it is done offshore — you virtually have a 24-hour workforce,” Tariq Hafeez, LegalEase Solutions L.L.C. president and general counsel, said. “Basically, around 10 p.m. here, in Michigan, is 8 o’clock in the morning in India, so we can have our attorneys working here until 5 or 6 p.m. in Michigan and then after a four hour gap, the work is picked up again in India. So we can get large projects done, or even short projects done; at a much shorter time than it would take otherwise.” According to the LegalEase Solutions Web site, once a client has contacted LegalEase Solutions and their information is collected, the information is transferred over to lawyers in India, the project is then researched and prepared and reviewed, and then given back to the client for their review and use of the product. The India-based attorneys have access to Lexis Nexis and other online research tools in order to complete projects from any jurisdiction, according to the site, and India-based legal professionals must have a minimum of five years experience before being hired by LegalEase Solutions.
“The people we’re working with are truly some of the smartest and brightest people we have met internationally;’ Akbar said. “These are really smart, creative, and talented people and what we’re doing is tapping into their intellectual capital. You’re actually tapping into this huge, vast resource of the rest of the world who are willing to direct their creative talents, their minds towards making the entire legal industry a little more efficient.”
“Lawyers have just begun to realize that outsourcing can benefit them just as outsourcing has benefited other industries in the United States,” Hafeez said. There may be those that are concerned or unwilling to turn to legal outsourcing for fear of displacement, however, Akbar disagrees and believes that legal outsourcing is not only a “new trend” but “it’s becoming a necessity” “So much of the law is not just sitting at a desk writing and researching — so much of it is actually active negotiation, face-to-face contact, being in court, and none of that is going to be threatened by outsourcing,” Hafeez agreed. “What we serve to do is make the process a lot more efficient:’ Akbar said. “Nearly all kinds of law firms and legal departments can use our services in some capacity,” Akbar noted. “Our main clients today are firms with a lot of litigation work who need the litigation support and corporate legal departments who are interested in cutting costs and keeping some work in-house.” “This is probably a good time for lawyers and law firms to try legal outsourcing out because a company like ours is really willing to engineer our processes around our clients. If we have a client who wants things done in a very specific way — we’ll make sure to do it that way because were new enough and we want to’ bring on. as much clientele as possible,” Hafeez said. “We don’t even invoice our clients until they are satisfied with our work, so it’s really a no risk proposition.” For more information on LegalEase Solutions L.L.C., call1-866-534-6177 or visit their Web site at wwwiegaleasesolutions.com.
Monday, February 06, 2006
Challenges of Going Solo
Young Attorneys Who Go Solo Face Hurdles but Reap Rewards
Hope Caldwell
The Legal Intelligencer02-06-2006
A new year always pushes people to make resolutions -- some vow to lose weight, find love or quit smoking. For young attorneys, starting one's own firm or business might be a goal, but for some it always remains just that: a goal
For attorneys working at firms, finding time to meet all of the requisite billable hours is the stressor that overtakes each day. However, for the solo practitioner, the stressor in their day is not limited to the billable hour but rather to a myriad of other concerns: marketing, administrative work, filing motions, arguing motions, answering the phone and paying the office bills, to name a few. The list goes on for solo practitioners trying to start their own business while providing a valuable service to their clients.
For solo practioners, more so than attorneys at firms, time management and optimizing one's use of time is paramount. Time-intensive legal research and writing and general document review is often times a crucial aspect of most solo attorneys' work load. Solos should really take a hard look at how legal outsourcing can help them manage their workload and still do a quality job for their clients.
LegalEase Solutions' client base consists of a healthy number of solo practitioners, who often times rely on LegalEase's research and writing services to get work completed on time. Moreover, as solos often don't have the luxury of having someone to ask for advice, the inexpensive use of legal outsourcing companies can help solos cope with the knowledge and experience deficit they often times inevitably have.
www.lgles.com
Hope Caldwell
The Legal Intelligencer02-06-2006
A new year always pushes people to make resolutions -- some vow to lose weight, find love or quit smoking. For young attorneys, starting one's own firm or business might be a goal, but for some it always remains just that: a goal
For attorneys working at firms, finding time to meet all of the requisite billable hours is the stressor that overtakes each day. However, for the solo practitioner, the stressor in their day is not limited to the billable hour but rather to a myriad of other concerns: marketing, administrative work, filing motions, arguing motions, answering the phone and paying the office bills, to name a few. The list goes on for solo practitioners trying to start their own business while providing a valuable service to their clients.
For solo practioners, more so than attorneys at firms, time management and optimizing one's use of time is paramount. Time-intensive legal research and writing and general document review is often times a crucial aspect of most solo attorneys' work load. Solos should really take a hard look at how legal outsourcing can help them manage their workload and still do a quality job for their clients.
LegalEase Solutions' client base consists of a healthy number of solo practitioners, who often times rely on LegalEase's research and writing services to get work completed on time. Moreover, as solos often don't have the luxury of having someone to ask for advice, the inexpensive use of legal outsourcing companies can help solos cope with the knowledge and experience deficit they often times inevitably have.
www.lgles.com
Thursday, February 02, 2006
Legal Demographics
Last night I attended a meeting of the American Inns of the Court , The Michigan State University College of Law American Inn of Court chapter. They featured a panel which showcased the trends in legal demographics and included some highly experienced, qualified and erudite lawyers .... and Tariq Hafeez. Tariq was easily atleast 30 years younger than the next youngest member of the panel.
What made the organization so interested in Tariq Hafeez was what he was trying to do with the legal profession - outsource it! Partners from some very large firms shook their heads in disbelief as the very concept. Yet at the very same time people were able to grasp the simple logic of its possibilities. But it has become more than a concept and is a reality.
Lawyers are becoming more cognizant of the changes within the legal profession. Another interesting fact that came out of the meeting was that there is an ever increasing number of International students who are stuyding American Law. In a new global economy and there seems to be emerging a truly global workforce of professionals networked from different parts of the world working toward common goals.
The forum had an excellently organized event which encouraged discourse and dissemination of knowedge.
What made the organization so interested in Tariq Hafeez was what he was trying to do with the legal profession - outsource it! Partners from some very large firms shook their heads in disbelief as the very concept. Yet at the very same time people were able to grasp the simple logic of its possibilities. But it has become more than a concept and is a reality.
Lawyers are becoming more cognizant of the changes within the legal profession. Another interesting fact that came out of the meeting was that there is an ever increasing number of International students who are stuyding American Law. In a new global economy and there seems to be emerging a truly global workforce of professionals networked from different parts of the world working toward common goals.
The forum had an excellently organized event which encouraged discourse and dissemination of knowedge.
Sunday, January 29, 2006
Friday, January 27, 2006
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.
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.
Tuesday, January 24, 2006
First salary hikes - Now bonuses?
Dont get be wrong. Its not a case of sour grapes. Kudos to all who earned those bonuses. But one begs the question - is the end cost to the client really an issue with the legal community? Among the top 5 things clients are looking for from law firms was cost saving initiatives. One can only think this is not really a priority for most large law firms. Associates are getting as much as 100% of their base salary in bonuses. According to Law.com's recent article As Times Get Better, So Do the Bonuses law firms increased the base salaries of their attorneys this year as well as their bonuses some to the tune of $150,000.
Monday, January 23, 2006
Lightened workloads getting heavy praise
by Tariq Hafeez, Esq
In today's Detroit Free Press, columnist Margarita Bauza writes, "Companies that respond to deamnds for reduced-worl arrangements are being rewarded with increased productivity, talent retention and improved employee relations, says Ellen Ernst Kossek, a workplace researcher at Michigan State University". She goes to cite a study undertaken over the last six years which finds that reduced work loads increased in 60% of firms polled and finds:
In today's Detroit Free Press, columnist Margarita Bauza writes, "Companies that respond to deamnds for reduced-worl arrangements are being rewarded with increased productivity, talent retention and improved employee relations, says Ellen Ernst Kossek, a workplace researcher at Michigan State University". She goes to cite a study undertaken over the last six years which finds that reduced work loads increased in 60% of firms polled and finds:
- Retention of talent was the top reason for reduced work load arrangemnets
- Hard economic times did not have a negative effect on reduced-load arrangements
Law firms will probably be slowest in adopting reduced work load for their associates, who ironically, likely need it the most. The billable requirements for associates at law firms nation-wide are almost impossible to attain without significant sacrifice in either quality of work or quality of life for associates, or a mix of the two. Much attention is being called to the system of billable hours and the absurdity of expecting associates to honestly bill for work when billable requirements are essentially impossible to reach (see the post dated 11/28/05 "The Billable Hours: Are its days numbered?"
By utilizing outsourcing as a tool to reduce workload pressure and strain on associates, law firms, can stand to gain significantly in morale and job satisfaction of their attorneys--all the while increasing productivity which results in happier clients. Law firms, no matter how huge can improve the quality of life of their associates by integrating legal outsourcing into their work. 15 years ago, heads of law firms would have laughed/scoffed at the idea that associates could reserach law on their computers without opening a single library book. Today those same law firm heads have realized the immense benefit of using Lexis and Westlaw. Similarly, while legal outsourcing may have its detractors now, it's only a matter of time before law firms realize that the last laugh is on them.
Saturday, January 21, 2006
Fixed Fee Vs Billable Hour
During a recent conversation, the Director of Litigation of a Fortune 100 company indicated that he had a fixed fee contract with his law firm for litigation support. How great is that idea? It sure did not work for Walmart - well nobody gets sued like Walmart.
Nonetheless, taking cue from the Wired GCs recent post...
"If we are only talking about “overseeing” litigation (whatever that really means), perhaps I can find a lawyer who will do this on a fixed fee. We assume that it is not a lawyer at the primary litigation firm. It should come as no surprise that most litigation is billed the good ol’ fashioned way–by the hour. I don’t know how many lawyers would want to “oversee” litigation for a fixed price when the underlying case is being billed by the hour. Part of me thinks that if you need someone to oversee a case, you may have the wrong person handling it in the first place."
There is bound to be some level of compromise somewhere. Let’s discuss some hypothetical scenarios.
Scenario 1: The workload substantially increases a particular month (Sarbanes Oxley has become omnipotent). How does the law firm handle the fluctuation? Scramble to find temporary lawyers or keep highly paid attorneys on its staff on call?
Scenario 2: The workload is minimal for a few months - free money for the law firm but the GC is under pressure to get the bang for his buck
Corybantic management on both sides.
Some amount of legal work needs to be commoditized for the lack of any other term. You need to slice up the work and compartmentalize wherever possible. However small that chunk is - only then can you even start budgeting something like that efficiently.
A large portion of legal work however will continue to be based on the billable hour but why not build efficiencies where you can?
Nonetheless, taking cue from the Wired GCs recent post...
"If we are only talking about “overseeing” litigation (whatever that really means), perhaps I can find a lawyer who will do this on a fixed fee. We assume that it is not a lawyer at the primary litigation firm. It should come as no surprise that most litigation is billed the good ol’ fashioned way–by the hour. I don’t know how many lawyers would want to “oversee” litigation for a fixed price when the underlying case is being billed by the hour. Part of me thinks that if you need someone to oversee a case, you may have the wrong person handling it in the first place."
There is bound to be some level of compromise somewhere. Let’s discuss some hypothetical scenarios.
Scenario 1: The workload substantially increases a particular month (Sarbanes Oxley has become omnipotent). How does the law firm handle the fluctuation? Scramble to find temporary lawyers or keep highly paid attorneys on its staff on call?
Scenario 2: The workload is minimal for a few months - free money for the law firm but the GC is under pressure to get the bang for his buck
Corybantic management on both sides.
Some amount of legal work needs to be commoditized for the lack of any other term. You need to slice up the work and compartmentalize wherever possible. However small that chunk is - only then can you even start budgeting something like that efficiently.
A large portion of legal work however will continue to be based on the billable hour but why not build efficiencies where you can?
Thursday, January 19, 2006
A New Balance
An excerpt taken from an article, taken from Legal Week, a UK based publication for UK lawyes, discusses a subject that corporate counsel in the US can relate to: the drive to cut legal costs, often times by legal departments taking on increasingly more work without going to outside counsel. Outsourcing routine legal work, as the article mentions, can help legal departmets control legal costs without giving up control to outside counsel. Case in point--Accenture UK, which has a captive off-shore in the Mauritius Islands.
Author: Ed ThorntonSource: Legal DirectorStart Date: 19/01/2006End Date: 16/02/2006
Law In Business: Law firms take note: in-house legal teams are taking on more and more work themselves, at the expense of their general advisers. Specialist external advice will remain in demand, but corporate counsel are confident of taking on major deals without law firms holding their hand. Ed Thornton reports
When BOC Group and Marks & Spencer (M&S) sealed a £1bn outsourcing contract in November, outside counsel were strangely absent from the line-up of key players. This was surprising, given that the deal was described by the two FTSE 100 companies as one of the largest food distribution contracts in the UK, seeing BOC deliver food to approximately 420 M&S stores until 2011. The BOC team was led by senior counsel Andrew Brackfield, an ex-Linklaters corporate partner, who worked alongside associate counsel Robert Breedon. Meanwhile, in-house lawyer Carolyn Lock led the M&S team. While Stevens & Bolton advised BOC on some property aspects of the deal, this was a deal where outside counsel played second fiddle to the in-house legal team, at best. Adrian Thurston, head of legal at MFI, thinks this may be symptomatic of a wider trend. "There is an ongoing realisation that it can be cost-effective to do work internally," he says. "[But] even well-stocked departments do not have the back-up of resources for a deal like that [that a law firm would have]. I expect it was quite a challenge." Nonetheless, with a legal department of 40 lawyers worldwide, BOC was convinced it had the resources and expertise to manage the deal in house — particularly since outsourcing was one of its strengths. "As business lawyers, we aim to know the business really well and provide a service," says Brackfield. "Economically, it makes sense to do as much in house [as possible]." . ........
Accenture’s 30-strong UK legal department found a creative way to control legal costs and bring Nevertheless, the trend among corporate legal departments to retain a greater volume and quality of work in house should cause law firms to take notice. In-house lawyers appear to be increasingly eager to try their hand at complex deal work sometimes thought to be the preserve of private practice specialists. At the same time, the Accenture example shows that the routine, day-to-day work can be outsourced further afield than the City.
Author: Ed ThorntonSource: Legal DirectorStart Date: 19/01/2006End Date: 16/02/2006
Author: Ed ThorntonSource: Legal DirectorStart Date: 19/01/2006End Date: 16/02/2006
Law In Business: Law firms take note: in-house legal teams are taking on more and more work themselves, at the expense of their general advisers. Specialist external advice will remain in demand, but corporate counsel are confident of taking on major deals without law firms holding their hand. Ed Thornton reports
When BOC Group and Marks & Spencer (M&S) sealed a £1bn outsourcing contract in November, outside counsel were strangely absent from the line-up of key players. This was surprising, given that the deal was described by the two FTSE 100 companies as one of the largest food distribution contracts in the UK, seeing BOC deliver food to approximately 420 M&S stores until 2011. The BOC team was led by senior counsel Andrew Brackfield, an ex-Linklaters corporate partner, who worked alongside associate counsel Robert Breedon. Meanwhile, in-house lawyer Carolyn Lock led the M&S team. While Stevens & Bolton advised BOC on some property aspects of the deal, this was a deal where outside counsel played second fiddle to the in-house legal team, at best. Adrian Thurston, head of legal at MFI, thinks this may be symptomatic of a wider trend. "There is an ongoing realisation that it can be cost-effective to do work internally," he says. "[But] even well-stocked departments do not have the back-up of resources for a deal like that [that a law firm would have]. I expect it was quite a challenge." Nonetheless, with a legal department of 40 lawyers worldwide, BOC was convinced it had the resources and expertise to manage the deal in house — particularly since outsourcing was one of its strengths. "As business lawyers, we aim to know the business really well and provide a service," says Brackfield. "Economically, it makes sense to do as much in house [as possible]." . ........
Accenture’s 30-strong UK legal department found a creative way to control legal costs and bring Nevertheless, the trend among corporate legal departments to retain a greater volume and quality of work in house should cause law firms to take notice. In-house lawyers appear to be increasingly eager to try their hand at complex deal work sometimes thought to be the preserve of private practice specialists. At the same time, the Accenture example shows that the routine, day-to-day work can be outsourced further afield than the City.
Author: Ed ThorntonSource: Legal DirectorStart Date: 19/01/2006End Date: 16/02/2006
Tuesday, January 17, 2006
Salary Hikes Galore!
Seems like most top law firms in the country are going to follow suit. Salary hikes mean
- firms will want more bang for the buck
- will mean they will either have to increase the number of billable hours required for their associates or increase their billing rates (if the partners want to continue making the same level of profits, which I assume they do)
- Might be a strategy to retain and attract the brightest(of which there are only so many) to maintain/increase their billing rates
- Might be a strategy to fight competition posed by avenues like legal outsourcing (a losing battle eventually)
Bottom line: Nobody retained market position very long by just paying more. Clients will realize that a plethora of legal work is not necessarily the most complicated and hence requires the best lawyers in the country. They will look for and demand cheaper alternatives. Score one more for legal outsourcing/offshoring.
An excerpt from an article in Law.com....
Keker Matches Associate Salary Hikes
Petra PasternakThe Recorder01-17-2006
Days after two big L.A. firms hiked base salaries for associates, San Francisco's Keker & Van Nest announced it was matching the raise.
Keker partner Christopher Kearney said last week that the 50-lawyer litigation firm would increase the base pay for first-year associates to $135,000 to compete with three L.A. firms that announced hikes in the past month.
- firms will want more bang for the buck
- will mean they will either have to increase the number of billable hours required for their associates or increase their billing rates (if the partners want to continue making the same level of profits, which I assume they do)
- Might be a strategy to retain and attract the brightest(of which there are only so many) to maintain/increase their billing rates
- Might be a strategy to fight competition posed by avenues like legal outsourcing (a losing battle eventually)
Bottom line: Nobody retained market position very long by just paying more. Clients will realize that a plethora of legal work is not necessarily the most complicated and hence requires the best lawyers in the country. They will look for and demand cheaper alternatives. Score one more for legal outsourcing/offshoring.
An excerpt from an article in Law.com....
Keker Matches Associate Salary Hikes
Petra PasternakThe Recorder01-17-2006
Days after two big L.A. firms hiked base salaries for associates, San Francisco's Keker & Van Nest announced it was matching the raise.
Keker partner Christopher Kearney said last week that the 50-lawyer litigation firm would increase the base pay for first-year associates to $135,000 to compete with three L.A. firms that announced hikes in the past month.
Friday, January 13, 2006
Don't Gloss Over The Very Real Benefits Of Legal Off-Shoring
by: Tariq Hafeez, Esq. (Partner and General Counsel of LegalEase Solutions)
Off-shoring of legal work, while easily overlooked, is an important development in the legal field. For one, it has allowed US lawyers to tap into the intellectual capital of lawyers all over the world. Just as important, it has and continues to help US attorneys save significantly on costs, often times resulting savings to clients.
Case in point: Prominent US based charity: We are currently handling an appeal in the DC Circuit for a US based charity which had its assets frozen. LegalEase recently started up an appellate division, and has teamed up with a brilliant appellate attorney in Detroit-Rubina Mustafa. Rubina brings with her over 10 years of state and federal appellate experience. The federal district court ruled against the charity and its attorney, based in the Detroit area, needed to appeal the ruling. This attorney, who is a top-notch trial attorney, did not have sufficient resources or funding to file an appeal. He turned to LegalEase's appellate services to handle the appeal, from filing the summary of the arguments to the actual appellate brief.
We have a team of attorneys working on this case, all managed by Rubina. We are billing the trial attorney less than $50/hour for this high level work--and this is only made possible because of legal off-shoring. Hope this makes you think twice before glossing over legal off-shoring. I would like to read your comments on this.
Off-shoring of legal work, while easily overlooked, is an important development in the legal field. For one, it has allowed US lawyers to tap into the intellectual capital of lawyers all over the world. Just as important, it has and continues to help US attorneys save significantly on costs, often times resulting savings to clients.
Case in point: Prominent US based charity: We are currently handling an appeal in the DC Circuit for a US based charity which had its assets frozen. LegalEase recently started up an appellate division, and has teamed up with a brilliant appellate attorney in Detroit-Rubina Mustafa. Rubina brings with her over 10 years of state and federal appellate experience. The federal district court ruled against the charity and its attorney, based in the Detroit area, needed to appeal the ruling. This attorney, who is a top-notch trial attorney, did not have sufficient resources or funding to file an appeal. He turned to LegalEase's appellate services to handle the appeal, from filing the summary of the arguments to the actual appellate brief.
We have a team of attorneys working on this case, all managed by Rubina. We are billing the trial attorney less than $50/hour for this high level work--and this is only made possible because of legal off-shoring. Hope this makes you think twice before glossing over legal off-shoring. I would like to read your comments on this.
Thursday, January 12, 2006
The Five Most Likely Outsourcing Trends of 2006
Sometimes even I just cant keep up with the hype. Yet another indicator toward the 'ever expanding' LPO market. An excerpt relevant to the legal outsourcing market....
In fact, a recent ValueNotes report on legal offshoring predicts that employment in legal outsourcing in India will grow more than ten-fold by 2010. Another ValueNotes research shows that the number of employees in publishing outsourcing will grow 5.6 times by 2010.
In fact, a recent ValueNotes report on legal offshoring predicts that employment in legal outsourcing in India will grow more than ten-fold by 2010. Another ValueNotes research shows that the number of employees in publishing outsourcing will grow 5.6 times by 2010.
Wednesday, January 11, 2006
CNN/IBN proflies the Legal Outsourcing Industry
Below are some highlights from a recent article appearing on CNN/IBN website on January 8, 2006 profiling the legal outsourcing industry:
They are among the more recent entrants to the outsourcing party. They are the Indian lawyers. If industry reports are any indication, the country's legal eagles could well give much muscle to India's knowledge process outsourcing growth story. The legal services sector is tipped to be the next big offshore destination and corporate lawyers are increasingly hopping on to the outsourcing bandwagon and are handling prestigious international clients.
Recent industry reports peg the annual value of legal outsourcing at $80 mn and predict that it will rise up to $4 bn by 2015 - that translates to almost 80,000 more jobs for lawyers in India.
"Indian law is based on common law and the common law governs the basic law everywhere in the world. Indian lawyers are much in demand right now due to their sheer understanding of the law," Gunjan, a partner with ZeusPro, says.
With a just a couple of thousand employees spread across less than 50 firms, LPO outfits in India offer paralegal and research support, draft and revise contracts, handle patent filing and prosecution for Multinational Corporations (MNCs) like GE, Oracle and Sun and international law firms.
The opportunities are immense and the new breed of lawyers swear by it. "I would say it is very exciting and there are tremendous opportunities for us," Gunjan says.
They are among the more recent entrants to the outsourcing party. They are the Indian lawyers. If industry reports are any indication, the country's legal eagles could well give much muscle to India's knowledge process outsourcing growth story. The legal services sector is tipped to be the next big offshore destination and corporate lawyers are increasingly hopping on to the outsourcing bandwagon and are handling prestigious international clients.
Recent industry reports peg the annual value of legal outsourcing at $80 mn and predict that it will rise up to $4 bn by 2015 - that translates to almost 80,000 more jobs for lawyers in India.
"Indian law is based on common law and the common law governs the basic law everywhere in the world. Indian lawyers are much in demand right now due to their sheer understanding of the law," Gunjan, a partner with ZeusPro, says.
With a just a couple of thousand employees spread across less than 50 firms, LPO outfits in India offer paralegal and research support, draft and revise contracts, handle patent filing and prosecution for Multinational Corporations (MNCs) like GE, Oracle and Sun and international law firms.
The opportunities are immense and the new breed of lawyers swear by it. "I would say it is very exciting and there are tremendous opportunities for us," Gunjan says.
Monday, January 09, 2006
LegalBulk
I found this rather hilarious cartoon in the New Yorker which I felt is fairly representative... (might actually need to read Acme LegalEase)
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