Legal Services - Analysis: India as an Offshoring Destination

The trend of outsourcing or offshoring commodity work to India has been growing at a great rate over the last two years. Work such as document review, legal research, contract drafting, patent applications, immigration law, litigation support and paralegal services, work usually done by paralegals or law assistants has slowly been finding its way to India. There are questions of ethics, security and overall confidence in the final deliverable. As the number of LPOs in India rises, Kloog steps in to create a legal offshoring model that ensures ethical, secure and top quality delivery of the final product. Let us first take a look into the brief advantages and disadvantages of offshoring to India:

 

Advantage India

 

1. Highest skill level

Culturally, middle class India has always been very education degree oriented. India has and continues to produce some of the world’s best scientists, engineers, doctors and lawyers. In India over 70000 new lawyers join the workforce every year. Indians are known for their work ethic and this stems from the high level of competition for a handful of top Universities in the country.

 

The work force for Indian legal offshoring vendors generally comes from the top five law schools in the country. Put into perspective, the numbers tell us that it is as difficult to attend the National Law School as it is to attend Harvard Law.

 

Therefore the level of intellectual competence of the work force of a legal outsourcing solutions provider far exceeds that of a paralegal or law assistant who would be executing comparable work. If we look at outsourcing as a whole, the slight weakness that we see in voice based labor does not exist when you move up the value chain.

 

There is no other offshore location that gives such a favorable skill advantage.

 

2. Cost reduction

Cost reduction was initial reason why India was successful in the outsourcing domain. The net savings to the client go further up as we move up the value chain. The difference in actual pay of high skilled executives between the US and India coupled with lower administrative and infrastructure costs allow us to cut our clients costs in half.

 

3. Common Law country

India, having being a colony of Great Britain still follows the common law system. This means that our lawyers in India are fully capable of understanding the law in other common law countries, e.g. USA, UK.

 

4. Time difference

The 9.5 – 13.5 time difference allows the client to achieve results through these vendors even while he sleeps. It allows the client to be able to take on a greater amount of work and increase billable hours!

 

Concerns

 

1. Confidential client information and data security

It is important to remember that lawyers in India cannot provide direct legal services to clients abroad as they cannot directly practice law in these countries. It is important for the client to share limited information with the Indian vendor in order to safeguard confidential data. Depending on the work it may even be important for the law firm to its clients consent before offshoring work. However this is not required in all cases. Conflict of interest may arise due to prior work or clients that the Indian vendor has dealt with. In this case as well it helps to safe guard the clients’ highly confidential data.

 

Whatever data is finally passed on to the Indian service provider is also confidential and must be treated so. Actually data security measures, though present in most Indian vendors, are still to reach the required infallible standards.

 

2. Cultural Competence

India may have a great level of skill; however the cultural differences in the law domain can lead to a gap between an Indian vendor and its client. The style of writing in Indian law is verbose and word friendly. As an international standard this style does not work, as a more to the point style is required. Though India’s official language is English the cultural usage differs and it is important to standardize this in order to merge presentation with quality delivery.