Outsourcing legal work to India

Washington Post:

When Aashish Sharma graduated from law school two years ago, his father had visions of seeing him argue in an Indian court and eventually become an honorable judge.

Instead, Sharma, 25, now sits all day in front of a computer in a plush, air-conditioned suburban office doing litigation research and drafting legal contracts for U.S. companies and law firms. He is part of a booming new outsourcing industry in India that employs thousands of English-speaking lawyers such as him to do legal work at a small fraction of the cost of hiring American lawyers.

"It is much better than going to court in India and dealing with all kinds of rough people. Working in legal outsourcing is a happy career move for me, although my father does not fully understand what I am doing here after my education in Indian law," said Sharma, who began working in February for an outsourcing company called Quatrro. "I am getting valuable exposure to the American judicial system, corporate law and their way of working."

Legal process outsourcing is being called the next big thing in Indian business. It marks India's climb up the chain of outsourcing jobs -- from low-end, back-office service functions in call centers to high-value, skilled legal work.

In the past three years, the legal outsourcing industry here has grown about 60 percent annually. According to a report by research firm ValueNotes, the industry will employ about 24,000 people and earn revenue of $640 million by 2010.

Indian workers who once helped with legal transcription now offer services that include research, litigation support, document discovery and review, drafting of contracts and patent writing. The industry offers an attractive career path for many of the 300,000 Indians who enroll in law schools every year. India and the United States share a common-law legal system rooted in Britain's, and both conduct proceedings in English.

The explosion of opportunity here was triggered by what are known as "e-discovery laws," a set of U.S. regulations established in 2006 to govern the storage and management of electronic data for federal court actions. Overnight, the volume of information to be stored, archived, filtered and reviewed for litigation swelled. But there were not enough affordable lawyers or paralegals to do the work in the United States.

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Ten years ago there were more lawyers in the city of Houston than there were in the whole state of Texas when I got my license in 1971. So, I don't think it is a shortage of lawyers that is responsible for the move. What has happened is the pay for the young lawyers who do the grunt work has also exploded, which makes a low cost alternative more attractive.

You still need local lawyers to be the face of the litigation especially in less urban areas. If you don't have local counsel in a south Texas courtroom you can expect to pay a lot of "windshield" time for lawyers going to appearances that wind up being reset over and over. You also need that local guy who can better gauge the prejudices of the prospective jurors too.

A little known fact that led to the British control of India was the importance of the rule of law. Indians found that in the British controlled areas contracts would be enforced. This led more of them to move into the British controlled portion which eventually spread throughout the subcontinent. It was a conquest through the rule of law and the British culture more than the force of arms that led to British control of India. Even with their superior arms and military ability, a small country like England could never have conquered India militarily.