Legal Outsourcing to India is Growing, but Still Confronts Fundamental Issues

Anthony Lin, New York Law Journal, January 23, 2008

With Forrester Research making projections of $4 billion in legal work that may be outsourced to India by 2015, legal outsourcing to India has finally come of age. Cost being one of the primary criterions for interest in India, most clients are also looking at better value from lawyers in India. LPO salaries for Indian lawyers are well below the $10,000 a year as compared to the $160,000 a year salaries in New York. But taking into account the infrastructure and technology costs, the rates charged by Legal Outsourcing companies in India is around $30, still lower than the rates charged by staffing agencies with temporary attorneys on their roll. The leading players in the space are Pangea3 with 240 lawyers in 3 Mumbai offices and Quislex, with 130 lawyers in Hyderabad.

LPOs offer mundane but time-intensive tasks associated with legal practice, reviewing mountains of documents for discovery rather than drafting appellate briefs. They also offshore and onsite packages, thus providing the best costs as well as services that are better handled by attorneys in domestic markets due to proximity and restricted data issues.

LPOs offer exciting options to Indian lawyers who earlier needed the right contacts for advancement in Indian law firms by providing them with a technology start-up like environment with the associated benefits. Due to the competition for the right talent and to keep the costs down, many LPOs are now looking at smaller cities and towns like Pune for setting up offices.

To address concerns of work quality and confidentiality, LPOs are developing robust technologies and processes and are also taking professional liability insurance policies. Read more...

Take a look at the India Report on Legal and Accounting Outsourcing to India

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