Miscellaneous

Article: Outsourcing - Offshoring Legal Work

By Bill Gratsch

Interesting article today on the Law.com network entitled GCs Embrace Outsourced Work.  The article discusses some of the latest developments in outsourcing and offshoring legal work to low cost providers worldwide. 

A few bullet points from the article:

• For Scott Rickman [attorney at Del Monte], the question is: Why pay big-firm associates $200 an hour to do document review when you can ship it out to India for $25 an hour?
• While many are still undecided or tentative, market researchers are bullish. Boston-based Forrester Research estimates the current value of legal work shipped overseas at $80 million, but predicts that $4 billion worth may head to India by 2015, according to an article last year in Legal Week, a Recorder affiliate.
• With futuristic names like Pangea3, Office Tiger and Lexadigm, companies that get legal work done in India are continuing to pop up, and investors are betting they'll succeed. Pangea3, which employs 240 lawyers in three Mumbai offices, got a $4.4 million investment by GlenRock Capital Advisers, the fund headed by former top private equity lawyer Lawrence Graev, who now serves as Pangea3's nonexecutive chairman. Last year, the company scored a $7 million investment by venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, which also helped shepherd Yahoo, PayPal and YouTube.
• Julie Mar-Spinola, a former VP at Atmel Corp. who headed up litigation and intellectual property, said she never liked the idea of sending document review or patent work to lawyers halfway around the world who don't know the company. "I think to ensure quality and consistency in the patent itself, you really need someone who understands the business and technology," said Mar-Spinola, who now heads her own e-discovery consulting shop, e-Compass. Mar-Spinola also said issues of confidentiality and conflicts -- such as the potential for an outsourcing firm to be doing work on both sides of a litigation -- are issues in-house counsel should seriously weigh.

You can read the bullet points in context as well as the whole article via this link: GCs Embrace Outsourced Work

Full post as published by Blawgs Blog by Bill Gratsch on January 25, 2008 (boomark / email).