Amazing Firms, Amazing Practices

Answer Your Outsourcing Questions

• Why do some corporations and law firms outsource legal work while others do not?
• What ethical issues arise in outsourcing legal services?
• Who is doing the outsourced work and what qualifications do they have?
• What type of legal work is being outsourced? What are the concerns regarding the outsourcing of patent drafting and patent searches?
• What impact, if any, will legal outsourcing have on the elite guild nature of the U.S. legal profession?

I suggest you decide whether your firm can afford not to have someone attend.

For more information, contact The Institute for Global Challenges and the Law at  the University of California, Berkeley School of Law:

Telephone: 510.642.7830
Fax: 510.643.2362           
email:GCL@law.berkeley.edu

Registration is a modest $150.

For questions or to register by phone, please contact Emily Arntz: 510-642-7830

To see a full description on line, go to the Institute for Global Challenges and Law

Here are some teasers/excerpts:

"Attacks on the competence of Indian lawyers and law graduates are about as valid as saying that Indian software engineers are incapable of handling sophisticated IT (information technology) work. To the contrary, the Indian IT industry is a world leader, and the same will be the case with offshored legal services."

"A recent study conducted by Harvard Law School and LexisNexis reveals that 75 per cent of US law graduates admit they do not have the necessary skills to practise law."

"So you would expect that these deficiencies would be met by rigorous training programs undertaken by Western law firms. Guess again! The Harvard-LexisNexis study reveals that 64 per cent of young lawyers receive no organised, on-the-job training."

"By contrast, reputable legal services offshoring companies in India provide rigorous training to their lawyers, and the hours spent on training do not appear on invoices to clients."  

"…at least in the US, law graduates for the most part are notoriously incapable of writing effectively in English. The problem is so severe that some large US law firms now assign a writing coach to each incoming associate. However, most lawyers in the West never receive this kind of training. By contrast, reputable legal services offshoring companies in India train all their attorneys in English writing."

"The future of the legal services offshoring industry in India appears very bright."

"Corporations, not Western law firms, will drive the market in the years ahead."

"Another way that corporations will drive the market, indirectly, is by obtaining flat (or fixed) rate billing from their outside counsel, instead of hourly billing. For example, the mega law firm, Morgan Lewis & Bockius, now handles all of the litigation for Cisco Systems for a fixed annual fee."

"Every sector of the legal offshoring industry will grow dramatically, including lower end services, such as document coding and legal transcription. Ultimately, however, the biggest impact, the long-term mother lode, will be higher-value services such as legal research and drafting – services that constitute the bulk of the legal work now done in the West."

"Long-term, India’s enormous, mostly untapped population of over one billion citizens will continue to make India competitive in relation to other offshore destinations… ultimately it will not only decrease poverty, but increase the number of law graduates."

"On the most positive note, the growth and development of the legal offshoring industry in India will help bring about a major change in the way legal services are delivered in the West."

"The objective is to have only the most valuable people in London or New York, and the others in India, China or Columbus, Ohio,'' said Robert Profusek, co-head of the mergers and acquisitions practice at Jones Day in New York, who sends low-end work to the cheapest locations and plans to open a document center in India. ``Lawyers are service providers. We are not gods.''

This comes from a gem-packed Bloomberg article today titled: “Jones Day, Kirkland Send Work to India to Reduce Client Bills” co-authored by Cynthia Cotts and Liane Kufchock

Here are some additional outsourcing factoids from the article:

• “Outsourcing will move about 50,000 U.S. legal jobs overseas by 2015”

• “Companies like Dupont, Cisco and Morgan Stanley have legal departments in India”

• “General Electric Co. sends about $3 million a year in routine legal work to its Indian affiliate”

• “Kirkland & Ellis, the seventh-largest U.S. law firm, works with offshore attorneys at the client's request”

• “Law firms can earn more by using labor they can mark up without disclosure,'' said Stephen Gillers, professor of legal ethics at New York University School of Law (referring to offshoring)

• “Law firms contribute 45 percent to offshore revenue, while corporate law departments contribute 36 percent”, ValueNotes said.

"…$18 million a year in savings to the world's largest law firm"

"…around-the-clock attention and legal advice for global clients"

This is no longer a hypothetical.  Many law firms who think this will not apply to their practice for a decade or two will soon wake up behind the eight ball. 

Outsourcing is neither easy nor comfortable but with approximately six times the number of lawyers graduating annually in India as in the USA and with escalating domestic support costs for labor and premises, clients will soon gravitate to those law firms who have figured out how to outsource. 

Read the full New York Times story: Law Firms Are Starting to Adopt Outsourcing