Outsourcing provides low-cost research and contract draftingPublished: Jun 22, 2008
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.
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 at 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.
"The new e-discovery rules sent American companies scurrying all over the place," said Srinivas Pingali, executive vice president at Quatrro.
"Neither the corporates nor the law firms in America are geared to do this kind of work at short notice," he said. "And that is where the Indian players come in. We can bring together a large number of skilled lawyers in no time at all and at one-fifth the cost."
Pingali said the economic slowdown in the United States has not hurt his company's business. In fact, legal work related to bankruptcies has increased.
"Ninety percent of a lawyer's work is legal research and drafting, and all this can now be offshored to India," said Russell Smith, who worked in a Manhattan law firm called SmithDehn before moving to India to set up an outsourcing company in 2006.
"A large portion of our fees in the U.S. is because of office rent. It is often a big decision to hire one attorney in the U.S. In India, we can hire 10 at a time and train them all at once," he said.
Meanwhile, Sharma said he learns something new every day doing legal work for Americans.
"I have learned so many new words," he said. "I keep Dictionary.com on standby. Recently, I had to look up the word "esquire.' I always thought it meant a respectable gentleman. But in America, it means an attorney."
http://articles.lancasteronline.com/local/4/223433
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