Source: www.lawyersweekly.ca

It’s already happened for a variety of manufacturing, accounting and information technology companies who seek cost advantages that Canadian industry can’t match. How easily could legal services follow suit offshore?

More easily than you might think. Consider: when my editor asked me to write this story, he told me to buy a long-distance phone card and charge it back to the newspaper. After all, he figured I’d spend plenty of time on the phone to India, the poster child for knowledge process outsourcing (KPO).

I never bought a phone card. I didn’t need it. Many offshore legal service providers have offices in the U.S. staffed by North American representatives. The one time I did need to call India, my contact, Ram Vasudevan, CEO of legal service provider Quislex, was very happy to call me between other calls he had scheduled during the late hours of his Indian night, which corresponds to an Eastern Daylight Time morning.

Nobody argues the facts: offshore legal service providers have the talent and the infrastructure to meet their clients’ business needs. They’re ready to serve Canadian lawyers. Are Canadian lawyers ready to take them up on it?

Perhaps. Chris Goodridge, director of corporate development and legal counsel for Torstar Corp., admits that continually rising legal fees have him trying to do as much work as possible in-house. Although Torstar hasn’t gone the outsourcing route, Goodridge didn’t rule it out.

Offshoring, a form of outsourcing, initially attracts interest because it’s cost-competitive. Service providers work on different continents where labour costs are substantially lower.

Knowledge process offshoring became practical only recently. According to Thomas Friedman’s tome The World is Flat, a trillion dollars of broadband capacity was strewn all over the globe during the Information Superhighway 1990s. When the dot-com bubble popped, opportunistic service providers acquired the wires at fire sale prices, and today they deal with far lower overhead than that which plagued their predecessors. Connect highly commoditized computing capacity and advanced workflow software to those fast wires and you have the express lanes that permit internationally dispersed teams to collaboratively drive a project.

The cost advantage Indian knowledge process outsourcers enjoy doesn’t seem set to disappear anytime soon. Consider: widely quoted statistics put the number of lawyers in India at one million, and Indian law schools graduate another 80,000 each year. Economics 101 dictates that wherever supply outstrips demand, prices fall or, at worst, stay stable. All things being equal, India’s legal industry should continue to reap huge crops of talent from which KPOs can pick the cream.

Their learning curve isn’t particularly steep, either. Indian lawyers receive training in English, in a common law system that has its roots in the U.K., the same place as that of Canada, the U.S. and Australia. Vasudevan himself worked for a major firm in New York, and in this he isn’t unique — many Indian lawyers gain experience in English-speaking countries before signing on with firms in their home countries.

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