Geogad, like all businesses, occasionally has need of lawyers and legal assistance.  I have heard that some businesses are outsourcing legal work to India.  This sounded like a good idea.  A company could work with two firms, one based in the US for complex legal matters and one based in India for more simple, straightforward contracts and legal work.

Some of the articles that I have read in the San Francisco Business Journal say that US law firms are having a hard time retaining junior lawyers.  Their work hours are very long, there is little chance that a junior lawyer will ever make partner at his firm, and much of the work is repetitive, mind-numbing basic legal work. 

OUtsourcing would seem to hold much promise in fixing this situation.  The reason is that Indian lawyers are less expensive than American lawyers ($80 vs. $300 or more) while they are trained in common law practices based on British law, as the US law systems is.  In addition, all of their training is in English.  Given the outsourcing trend, it seems very logical to outsource this very paper-intensive type of work, especially for some of the more basic types of contracts and work.

I have seen several web article taking about this trend:

http://www.abanet.org/lpm/lpt/articles/mgt04063.shtml

http://www.managedoutsource.com/blog/2006_04_30_archive.html

 http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1098907069708

 Several large companies such as Microsoft and General Electric seem to be leading the charge to India. 

I have contacted some of the Indian outsource legal firms.  It seems that they are not able to give legal advice, possibly because they do not have anyone on staff that has pass a U.S. bar exam.  As a result, they can do some basic search, but they are not able to finalize legal contracts.

Most of the articles that I have read on Indian outsourcing seem to suggest that one of the main holdups for US firms to outsource is that they are concerned about quality “..from lawyers that they have never met.” Coming from the tech side of things, this concept seems strange to me.  I would guess that it is easier to define and test for high-quality work in tech and software than in legal.  But some other comments made about being afraid that someone in India might make a mistake seems off the wall.  Someone in the US may make a mistake as well.  The real question is whether there are good controls to catch mistakes.  That is how it works in the tech industries.

Technorati tags: lawyers, outsourcing, legal work, contracts