In New York City, an assistant attorney general for New York State Christopher Wheeler used to spend most of the time arguing in courtrooms. They works in a sprawling unfinished planned suburb of New Delhi, where office buildings are sprouting from the empty lots and dirts roads are fringed with the fresh juice stalls and construction rubble. The legal outsourcing firms, Mr. Wheeler manages a team of 110 Indian lawyers who do the grunt work traditionally assigned to the young lawyers in the United States at the fraction of the cost. In the recent years, the India’s legal outsourcing industry has grown from an experimental endeavor to a small but mainstream part of the global business of law. The cash conscious Wall Street banks, mining giants, insurance firms and industrial conglomerates are hiring lawyers in India for the document review, due diligence, contract management and more.
To win a new clients and take on more sophisticated work legal outsourcing firms in India are actively recruiting experienced lawyers from the west and the American and British lawyers from the West and the American and British lawyers who might once have turned up their noses at the idea of moving to India. It is an outright hostility to outsourcing legal work in principle are re evaluating the sector. The number of the legal outsourcing companies in India has mushroomed to more than 140at the end of 2009 from 40 in 2005. The revenue at India’s legal outsourcing firms is expected to grow to $440 million this year, up 38 percent from 2008 and it should surpass $1 billion by 2014. This is not a big historical movement, there is an increasing pressure by the clients to reduce costs and increase efficiency and with the companies that is already familiar with the outsourcing tasks like the Information Technology work to India,legal services is a natural next step.
The number of the Western lawyers is moving to the outsourcing companies that could be called more of a trickle than a flood, but it may change as more business flows out of the traditional law firms and into India. The compensation for top managers at the legal outsourcing firms is competitive with the salaries at the midsized law firms outside of the major metropolitan areas of the United States executives in the industry. The living costs are much lower in India and often there is the added allure of the stock in the outsourcing company.
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