<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>