<p>There was a recent article in Time about how certain law and medical jobs can be outsourcable. Knowing Time, like most American publications, is a mediocre judge of modern circumstances much less the future, how outsourcable are lawyer-jobs? Are top law jobs more safe than lower-tier law jobs? </p>
<p>A professor I had at my university (top 10) said that law was one of the few fields that is more or less safe from outsourcing. Is this true?</p>
<p>It's true, more or less. Much of the practice of law as we know it today requires face time. Practicing law in the US requires a great deal of language profiency, and an intimate familiarity with the cultural context in which it is being practiced.</p>
<p>That said, modern communication has changed things remarkably. I worked for 14 months in a job that was previously performed by a performed by a person living in Taiwan; my replacement (my choice) also lives in Taiwan. I traveled to Asia frequently in that position, and worked Sunday through Thursday nights. </p>
<p>Remote competition for many legal jobs is more likely to come from elsewhere in the US than it is to come from overseas. That trend is attenuated somewhat by state bar membership rules. Those rules are loosening a bit; the reality is that anyone who represents large corporations by necessity has a somewhat multi-jurisdictional practice.</p>
<p>"By early 2000, the law firm had started changing even more. We are currently witnessing massive growth in the outsourcing of legal services to India, where fresh lawyers from top law schools educated in English common law will happily work six days a week for $300 a month. While this trend is relatively recent, case law editors at West Publishing are now in India, American law firms are now having patents written and researched in India, legal research is now being done in India by several concerns, and the businesses that are providing these services are growing by leaps and bounds.</p>
<p>While this movement is certainly in its early stages, it is gaining steam fast, very fast. Just as computer programming jobs have gone by the millions to India, China, and other developing countries, putting untold numbers of Americans out of work, so too will legal jobs.</p>
<p>In thinking about this issue, I cannot help but be reminded of the attitude of computer programmers throughout the 1990s and until 2001. These programmers were arrogant, would switch jobs at the drop of a hat, demanded outrageous salaries or hourly rates, would only work on projects that interested them, and (if not) demanded stock options. When I put out an ad for a computer programmer recently for BCG Attorney Search, I believe we received more than 2,000 applications in less than 48 hours. In fact, I received so many applications, I had to call Monster and request the ad be pulled because I could not operate my email effectively because applications were arriving so rapidly.</p>
<p>Similarly, the patent attorney is under assault from the developing world, and I can envision a time in the near future when a slew of applications will come for those jobs too-in a lighter sense, this is already occurring. Three years ago, firms would kill for a patent attorney in the United States. Patent attorneys were sometimes receiving bonuses of $50,000 or more and were, in many cases, extremely arrogant about their prospects. So too it will be with other practice areas of the law. These areas of the law will be under assault as soon as lower-cost service providers are identified."</p>
<p>"One lure of the Indian legal market: the sheer number of lawyers it offers. More than 200,000 Indians graduate from law school there every year -- five time as many as in the U.S. -- creating an enormous pool of talent to tap.
While American law firms routinely use domestic contract lawyers to save money, most have been slow to send work to India. Gregg Kirchhoefer, a partner at Kirkland & Ellis of Chicago, one of the more prestigious and profitable American firms, estimates it could be 50 years before lawyers in India do more than "routine, prosaic" American legal work. He expressed reservations about whether Indian lawyers are ready to handle the complex, high-end work in which his firm specializes. "Firms like ours that work on complicated and significant cases don't expect the main part of that work effort to be done [offshore] at the same level we do it," he says.
But that attitude may change once major companies grow comfortable using Indian lawyers. "Law firms don't want to be the first to embrace the trend," says Philadelphia lawyer Ajay Raju, who advises companies doing business in India. They figure, "Let others get burned first," he says. But he says he plans to propose that his firm, Reed Smith LLP, which has about 1,000 lawyers, start using lawyers in India for litigation support and other discrete tasks. After all, he says, "Why have a $300-per-hour lawyer do due diligence when it can be done [more cheaply] by someone else?"
Bickel & Brewer, a Dallas law firm that specializes in litigation, has already moved in that direction. In 1995, it created a subsidiary business in Hyderabad, India, called I&A International, to help it enter documents onto a searchable, electronic database. That's a nonlegal task, but more recently the firm's I&A unit has hired lawyers to review documents produced in lawsuits. "We specialize in big-ticket cases that often involve millions of pieces of information," says firm co-founder William Brewer III. "So having [Indian] lawyers on staff allows us to control expenses." "</p>
<p>From some Wall Street Article I believe (can't find the source). It seems that this low-quality work would hit T3-T4 grads the hardest?</p>
<p>That post scared the hell out of me.</p>
<p>Unless someone who has studied law in India qualifies to sit for, takes and passes a U.S. law bar exam in the state in which they wish to practice, these outsourced "laywers" will continue to do nothing more than document review, research and other work not typically performed by U.S. attorneys in sophisticated law practices. Even then, though, all of these kinds of work must ultimately be supervised by U.S. admitted attorneys, who will be held responsible under the ethics and other rules governing the practice of law, for the document review and other work. If it is too difficult for this supervision to take place, I imagine that this kind of outsourcing would have limited applications. The lawyers who may have something to fear from these practices are the "contract" lawyers, who do similar kinds of document review and other work.</p>
<p>I think one possible model is that you will have Indian-Americans who have passed the US-bar exam setting up their own law firms or divisions of law firms in which much of the grunt work is performed by cheap Indian lawyers, and the results are then supervised by that state-Bar-licensed Indian-American. In that sense, that guy would be something of a combination 'project-manager' and salesman in that he would be the guy who would provide all of the client face-time, as well as fly back to India when necessary to supervise the work done there. This is no different from those Indian-American doctors who are licensed to practice medicine in the US but who have gone back to India to establish their own medical-outsourcing businesses. </p>
<p>I think you could say that all lawyers, not just contract lawyers, have something to fear from outsourcing because labor is, by its nature, somewhat fungible. By that I mean that if those contract lawyers lose their jobs from outsourcing, they not just going to go down without a fight. They are going to want to do some other type of legal work in another field, and that will place pressure on other lawyers in that field. A ripple effect will therefore occur. This is akin to how, when the dotcom bust occurred, and thousands of formerly highly paid computer engineers and dotcom managers/entrepreneurs suddenly found themselves out of work, the competition for admissions spots at some of the top graduate programs skyrocketed. I'm sure that there were some people who would have gotten into a top grad program in a 'normal' year but who just happened to have the bad luck to apply during the dotcom bust year, and so didn't get in, even if they had nothing to do with the dotcom economy. That's an example of the ripple effect.</p>
<p>Contract LAwyers are the lowest of the low: piddling grads from T3 and T4 schools. They are not going to apply pressure on any other part of the legal field because being a contract lawyer is already being at the bottom of the heap. They do document review without benefits on short-term contracts for pitiful wages (in relation to the cost of their law school degree).</p>
<p>"Contract LAwyers are the lowest of the low: piddling grads from T3 and T4 schools."</p>
<p>First, I think that your characterization of contract lawyers as the "lowest of the low" is a bit dramatic and goes too far. Second, it's not just T3 and T4 attorneys who are doing contract work. The reality is that if you come out of T1 or T2 law school with student loans to pay off (as many do), and if your large, prestigious law firm lays you off because the economy is not so hot and you can't get a job because all of the other law firms are laying off attorneys rather than hiring them, you, too, may end up doing contract work. It's not glamorous, but it's a living. Contract lawyers may still make a lot more money than people in many other industries make (often depends on the situation -- for example, whether that contract attorney was a direct hire by the law firm (not typical) or went through an agency that takes a cut). I think that the most difficult thing for these contract lawyers is that they are not gaining much substantive experience, so getting off of the treadmill of doing contract work can be incredibly difficult.</p>