US COMPANIES NOW OUTSOURCE LEGAL WORK TO INDIA

Source: domain-B.com
16 June 2007

After law firms and individual attorneys outsourcing their legal processes to India, US law firms have got into the act.

US companies fighting a case in the US hire just one lawyer to appear in court while they station their entire legal department in India because most of the research and paperwork for large American corporates is currently being done in India.

A number of Indian companies are employing large number of lawyers and doing high-end legal document work for big companies like Calvin Klein, Universal Pictures, 20th Century Fox, HBO and John Wiley and Sons in the US.

LPO has now become a $61-million business with work coming from several sources into the country. Law firms are still the leading source the business (49 per cent), but catching up fast are corporates who form a significant chunk (36 per cent) of the sourcing pie, while the rest is shared by individual attorneys and legal publishers.

India churns out close to 200,000 law graduates every year of which only about 79,000 are English-speaking and hardly 850 get into jobs into top law firms in the country.

India, the US and the UK share similar legal systems and Indian Universities educate lawyers to work only in the Indian legal system.