As an assistant attorney general for the New York State, Christopher Wheeler used to spend most of his time arguing in courtrooms in New York City. The unfinished planned suburb of New Delhi where office buildings are sprouting from the empty lots and dirt roads are fringed with fresh juice stalls and construction rubble. A legal outsourcing firm, Mr. Wheeler manages a team of 110 Indian lawyers who do the grunt work traditionally assigned to young lawyers in the United States at a fraction of the cost. India’s legal outsourcing industry has grown in the recent years from an experimental endeavor to a small but mainstream part of the global business of the law. The Cash conscious wall street banks, mining giants, insurance firms and the industrial conglomerates are hiring lawyers in India for the document review, due diligence, contract management and more.
To win new clients and take on more sophisticated work, the legal outsourcing firms in India are actively recruiting experienced 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 or harbored an outright hostility to the outsourcing legal work in principle are reevaluating the sector. The number of the legal outsourcing companies in India has mushroomed to more than 140 at the end of 2009 from 40 in 2005. The revenue at India’s legal outsourcing firms is expected to grow to $440 million up 38 percent from 2008 and should surpass $1 billion by 2014.
There is an increasing pressure by the clients to reduce costs and increase efficiency, this is not a blip and this is a big historical movement. With the companies 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 moving to the outsourcing companies could be called more of a trickle than a flood. As more business flows out of the traditional law firms and into India. The compensation for the top managers at the legal outsourcing firms is the competitive with the salaries at the midsize law firms outside of the major metropolitan areas of the united states in the industry. The living costs are much lower in India and there is the added allure of the stock in the outsourcing company.
The outsourcing remains a highly contentious issue in the West, it is particularly as law firms have been trimming their staffs and curtailing hiring plans. The Western lawyers who have joined outsourcing firms are unapologetic about the shift to India. As managing lawyer for the giant mining company Rio Tinto in February to become director of the legal outsourcing for the CPA Global, a contract legal services company with the offices in the Europe, the United States and India.
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