Wednesday, March 01, 2006 1:36 PM
This is a bit off-topic, but I have been meaning to link to this
Excited Utterances posting for about two months. The posting offers an interesting overview of the state of offshoring/outsourcing legal work, both administrative and technical. Nothing happens overnight in the legal vertical, but the long-term trend lines are pretty evident.
For techical work, law firms will ultimately face a few choices. Staff up significantly with permanent IT hires; try and get by with fewer people being asked to do more and more complex tasks; or outsource particular workloads to third parties. While my own sense is that the trend line is pointing towards outsourcing, I don"t think law firms totallly have made up their minds on this question.
In terms of the administrative side of the equation, the issue may well be driven by client expectations. For larger firms with global clients, having legal research done in India may not even be seen as "offshoring" when viewed through a global lens. For example, Coca-Cola generates most of its profits overseas and has a global operation that involves legal work all over the world. I would think that U.S.-based paralegals and junior associates at law firms serving Coca-Cola are researching legal issues arising in foreign countries. What if that same law firm decided to move some of its legal research to India or similar? So, instead of U.S.-based employees doing research on foreign law, offshored legal contractors were doing research on foreign law.
Also, as big, global corporations offshore more and more back office functions, including accounting and finance, the expectation that some routine legal work would follow just seems to me more likely than not.
And, of course, for U.S.-based legal professionals, that opens the doors to opportunity. We are already seeing lawyers here in the U.S. start new legal offshoring companies to help law firms and corporate legal departments offshore more legal work. I would expect that everyone from law librarians to outside legal consultants will also starting looking for niches and opportunities as the marketplace evolves.
In sum, while I think the transition will be as slow as most things in legal are, I just don"t think the trendline is going to reverse.
ministrative work.