<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>