On July 16, the Legal Outsourcing Chapter will be conducting its second webinar.
It will have Legal Outsourcing: A Practical Perspective as its theme.
Mark Ross, Lawscribe director will introduce the panelists and initiate the program.
Arun Jethlamani and Neeraja Kandala, both from the leading independent research company ValueNotes, will be the webinar’s first expert panelists.
They will use their expertise and the results of their research to throw light on “Document Review”, and “Patent Support”. These two legal operations account for the lion’s share of offshored legal outsourcing contracts.
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Although most law firms accede to the fact that legal outsourcing, especially to India is now a reality, different lawyers have different opinions about it.
Here are some opinions.
Rob Hyndman, technology business lawyer, Toronto, Ontario, Canada: …And at least among lawyers, it’s a pretty notorious fact that in the big firms the work performed by juniors is (too) often completely unsupervised and not adequately reviewed for quality. The firms treat it as ’sink-or-swim’ training, and for that purpose it’s ultimately quite effective. But as to quality control, it’s often effectively outsourced blindly. My suspicion is that work outsourced to India is, at least in that regard, often of superior quality. And I see no difference between outsourcing to a junior, for review by the lead lawyer, and outsourcing to India, for the same review.
Jerome Shestack, former president American Bar Association, head of litigation Wolf, Block, Schorr and Solis-Cohen. “I think a lawyer has a responsibility over his work and he just can-t delegate it…The problem with outsourcing is, how do you keep control over it? How do you see how it’s being done?” …
“Yes, I do have concern about confidence, confidentiality, privacy, conflict of interest, ethical values, and those are issues are a real concern.”
Larry Newman, specialist in corporate transactions: “They have been instrumental in getting favorable results even in complex cases.”
Prism Legal’s Ron Friedmann, member NYC Large Law Firm KM Group: I’ve talked to lawyers who-d like to explore offshoring document review and to CIOs who want to investigate outsourcing help desks. So in my experience, outsourcing is not hype but serious consideration of this option, however, does not guarantee rapid growth. ”

In spite of the bar associations of New York, California and Los Angeles and others giving offshoring of legal support work by American attorneys to lawyers in other countries a clean chit, there still seems to be some apprehension about it. Large law firms have not jumped on to the band wagon as eagerly as expected and it is the smaller firms that appear to be diving in.
Let us look at one such firm, LegalEase Solutions. Based in Detroit this outsourcing business has about 50 American clients.
It has about 20 lawyers in India who perform all the regular tasks starting with researching legal precedents and proceeding to drafting briefs.
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In its recent article, GCs Embrace Outsourced Work on the Law.com network many of the most recent developments with regard to outsourcing and offshoring legal work are talked about.
“Why pay big-firm associates $200 an hour to do document review when you can ship it out to India for $25 an hour?” asks attorney Scott Rickman at Del Monte Foods who finds that sky high rates and the ever escalating demands of e-discovery have forced the San Francisco firm to contemplate outsourcing the company’s legal work.
The article goes on to name big companies like Microsoft Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc that have already started doing so.
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