Well I’m glad to see the outrage and maybe something will be done to limited the abuse of outsourcing.

In solidarity…because I feel your pain.

Regarding Anon Lawyer’s comment that firms outsource and bill as if a senior partner did the work himself, be it outsourced to India or a junior associate did the work, that’s fraud. Accordingly, if Anon specifically knows of such attorneys/firms doing this, then Anon is required to report such malfeasance to the State Bar. And if Anon fails to do so, then, he is just as deserving of censure.

As for outsourcing litigation generally, I think it’s a bad idea, and not just because it’s my meal ticket. The fact of the matter is that even in a case when there’s a vast document production (and I’m talking millions of documents), it’s still incredibly important to have ready access to the litigating partners, the clients, and the witnesses. You can’t adequately prepare a case without that.

I’m not saying legal fees can’t be exorbitant, but comments made by SDD’s rep should be taken with a carton of salt. First, $450+ is an amount charged by a senior partner, and rarely do they actually do initial work. They’re always doing more review, advising. It’s unfair to indicate that’s the across the board amount. And much of the real grunt work is done by paralegals and legal assistants, who don’t bill near that.

And you do get what you pay for. By that I mean not just experience, but reputation, eg Bert Fields gets his calls returned. A nobody from Podunk firm isn’t taken nearly as seriously, even if his case is just as solid as Fields’. Additionally, an Indian associate can’t (or least shouldn’t by law) know the ins and outs of a particular courthouse, judge, etc. Saying SDD hires “Local counsel” for LA is an outrage. Local counsel is a term used for attorneys who are often just messenger boys who can file papers but often have no substantive input whatsoever.

Finally, SDD’s rep is completely disingenuous for the recommendation to look at the Lexis article, as if it was written by Lexis itself. It’s an article written by SDD’s own Smith, and therefore it is obviously not an impartial analysis. If that is the SDD method of presenting facts in a legal argument, I fear for those who litigate with or against it.

This is over billing at its worse (by whomever quoted $250k and to anyone who would charge $40k). Large California law firms who handle entertainment/1st Amendment work have most of the research done and most of the motion already written - all they would have to do is do research on the particular issue and tailor the motion to their client’s circumstances. I can see this work taking maybe 10 hours at best. It is instances like this that give myself and other attorneys a bad name.

As Vidia says above, without them getting involved, less legal action would happen. (I’m paraphrasing, bear with me.) A settlement would take minutes, whereas a motion takes hours (at best), and involves more court time. Therefore, the legal system in the US start getting even more cases. Then, with more and more legal research being done overseas, the domestic legal firms will have less incentive to hire local help - in this case, newly graduated law students. At best, the free market principle says that they will be paid less, but most likely less will be hired. Of those that are hired, more and more of them will be “mouthpieces” - people that haven’t spent any time on that case, except to read what has been prepared for them.

Eventually, you end up with a whole bunch of young, hungry lawyers not being able to find work at anything approaching the wage they need to make to pay off their student loans. The answer? Start agitating to stop outsourcing…

Eventually, an equilibrium will be reached, where a lot of the “busy work” of research will be performed overseas, but local talent will be the ones presenting it. In the mean time, a lot of lawyers that would have gotten jobs defending US companies that are sending manufacturing and support overseas are going to be out of work - and VERY few people will feel sorry for them.

Oh, and by the way, calling something “hack-proof” is the best way to be sure that it is attacked. If this article is widely seen, expect your servers to be hit hard…

Moreover, the work of first-year associates, who start work at law firms before their bar exam results are in (and who often fail on their first attempt), is billed out to clients for as much as $360 per hour or more.

I’m curious as to what support Vidya has to show that associates working for firms who bill their the work of their first-years at $360+ an hour fail often fail the bar. It’s true that the major virms (i.e., Vault 100) bill their first-years out at such a rate. But these firms also mostly hire from the top ten, or twenty law schools in the country — schools like Harvard, University of Chicago, etc. And at these schools 95%+ of the students pass the par on their first attempt (see US News’s Annual list of top law schools). So to suggest that law firms are billing inflated rates for employees who often don’t even pass the bar distorts the truth.

Sorry for the thread derailment…

As for you claim that the Ali G suit would have been settled without you doing the research on the Motion to Dismiss - these types of motions are very typical and any decent sized law firm would already have most of the research already done and would use a paralegal or 1st or 2nd year associate to do the final research and motion work.

The same is permitted in the case of legal offshoring firms in India. At SDD Global Solutions, for example, we are an India offshoring company managed by a U.S. law firm, such that all of the work by Indian attorneys is supervised, reviewed, and edited (if needed) by licensed U.S. attorneys. Several other high-end legal offshoring companies also have licensed U.S. attorneys on their payroll, or at least affiliated with the offshoring unit. Even where the offshoring companies themselves do not employ licensed attorneys, the work can be supervised by in-house counsel for corporate clients, or by Western law firms who act as intermediaries, hiring the offshore unit on behalf of their clients.

On the subject of confidentiality, this is a legitimate concern of clients, regardless of whether the legal service provider is a Western law firm or an offshoring company in India. Based on my experience both with U.S. law firms and the provision of legal services in India, I believe that quality offshore providers generally are doing a better job than U.S. law firms in addressing this issue.

For example, at SDD Global, we use secure, hack-proof IBM servers, and the latest Cisco ASA firewall to protect data and systems from internet vulnerabilities. Even more protection is provided by a Linux environment throughout our offices. Electronic access control is provided for all areas of the building, such that no one is able to enter any floor or project area without being specifically authorized to do so, and without using a custom-made electronic access card. Our offices are virtually paperless, and passwords are required for all data access. Most importantly, we take great care in selecting employees. We hire only one out of every 900 applicants, and only after a lengthy battery of evaluations and tests, as well as a thorough background check. SDD Global is not alone in this attention to security. As research analysts have reported regarding our industry, “vendors have invested significantly in systems and processes to ensure data security – often to a greater degree than their overseas clients.

Compare this with many U.S. law firms, where Microsoft-based networks are vulnerable to hacking, where paper trails abound, where employees are able to roam the offices at will, and where in one famous case, a person posing as an attorney was entrusted with the management of important client files, even though this felon had never attended law school or passed the bar exam.

The tremendous cost savings available from legal services offshoring are sometimes met with disbelief. Some partners at large law firms in particular are prone to making comments such as “you get what you pay for.” First, let’s examine what a client pays for when it hires the typical large Western law firms (although there are exceptions):

(a) staggering real estate costs, due to the location of office space in some of the most expensive locations in the world, most of which are at least 43 times more expensive per square foot than SDD Global’s office building in Mysore, India;

(b) having most of the work done by newly minted (and sometimes even unlicensed) associates who admittedly lack many of the skills needed to practice law, but yet are paid a starting salary of $160,000 per year, and who are learning as they go along, at the expense of clients, who in turn are charged as much as $360 or more per hour for the privilege;

(c) unnecessary stretching out of work assignments or sometimes padding of time sheets, structurally encouraged by an hourly billing system that rewards heavy hours and inefficiency, as young associates struggle to meet ever-increasing demands to increase their billable time, with yearly quotas that have risen from 1600 hours in the 1960’s, to 2100-3200 hours at many large firms today; and

(d) generally a high-quality level of service, due to editing and supervision by talented senior lawyers, but at a cost that clients are no longer willing to tolerate, especially when offshore providers offer flat rates and hourly rates that average from $25 to $90 per hour for high-end work, and $10-25 per hour for lower-end work, as compared to $300-2000 per hour for Western lawyers.

When a client hires a reputable legal offshoring company in India, whether directly or through a forward-thinking law firm that passes along the savings, the client pays for high-quality, efficient, and timely legal services, performed by enthusiastic and qualified lawyers at locations that serve the best interests of the client. So yes, “you get what you pay for!”

MYTH NUMBER THREE: The Higher the Level of Work, the More Risk of Ethical Violations or Breaches of Confidentiality

An issue sometimes has arisen as to whether the high-end legal research and drafting services provided to Western clients from India amounts to an unauthorized practice of law. This rapidly is becoming a non-issue. Ethics panels in New York, Los Angeles, San Diego, and Florida all have concluded that that the offshoring of legal work to unlicensed attorneys is permissible, so long as the work is supervised by a licensed attorney. The New York Times has quoted Stephen Gillers, a professor at NYU School of Law and legal ethics expert, as stating that “‘[t]here is no problem with off-shoring…because even though the lawyer in India is not authorized by an American state to practice law, the review by American lawyers sanitizes the process.’ ”

MYTH NUMBER ONE: Indian Lawyers Lack the Skills and Aptitude to Handle High-End Legal Work for the West

Attacks on the competence of Indian lawyers and law graduates are about as valid as saying that Indian software engineers are incapable of handling sophisticated IT work. To the contrary, the Indian IT industry is a world leader, and the same will be the case with offshored legal services.

A. Indian Legal Training vs. Western Legal Training

Legal education in both India and the English-speaking West serves essentially the same purpose – to train its graduates to “think like lawyers” and to teach them how to conduct research in the British-based, common law system. Western law schools, however, do not train students to practice law. A recent study conducted by Harvard Law School and LexisNexis reveals that 75% of U.S. law graduates admit they do not have the necessary skills to practice law. Interestingly, when young lawyers were asked what is the one thing that they wish they had learned, the most frequent answer was “how to draft a motion.” Yet, motion practice is at the heart of litigation services provided to clients by law firms.

Since Western law schools are mostly litigation-oriented, their failure to train students in the most basic of litigation skills is especially disappointing. However, clients who pay high hourly fees for corporate and transactional work by recent U.S. law graduates often are short-changed even further. It is typical for Western law students to graduate from law school without ever having learned how to draft a contract.

So you might expect that these deficiencies would be met by rigorous training programs undertaken by Western law firms. Guess again! The Harvard / LexisNexis study reveals that 64% of young lawyers receive no organized, on-the-job training. They learn as they go along, mostly by trial and error, with their firms’ corporate clients footing the bill.

By contrast, reputable legal services offshoring companies in India provide rigorous training for their lawyers, and the hours spent on training do not appear on invoices to clients. At SDD Global Solutions, for example, all of our Indian attorneys are trained by veteran Western practitioners who are at the top of their fields. Our training program accomplishes what Western law schools and many law firms have failed to achieve, namely, the systematic preparation of young lawyers to provide quality legal services.

B. English Communication Skills in India and the West

George Bernard Shaw, and later, Winston Churchill, famously referred to Britain and the United States as two countries “separated by a common language.” Because Indian legal education is conducted in English, and because India generates 80,000 English-speaking law graduates per year. Similar statements have been made about the difference between English communication skills in India and the West. What these accusations miss is the fact that, at least in the U.S., many law graduates are notoriously incapable of writing effectively in English. The problem is so severe that some large U.S. law firms now assign a writing coach to each incoming associate. However, most lawyers in the West never receive this kind of training. By contrast, reputable legal services offshoring companies in India provide training in English writing for all of their attorneys.

C. The U.S. Bar Exam vs. Indian Leaving Exams

In India there are no bar exams. Instead, Indian law students, unlike U.S. law students, must pass a comprehensive final or “leaving” exam in order to graduate. But in part because India has no bar exam, some commentators have suggested that Indian lawyers working for legal offshoring companies should be required to pass a certification test, to demonstrate their ability to provide Western legal services. This is an admirable effort. But who will develop a certification system for Western lawyers, many of whom lack skills needed to properly practice law? Regarding bar exams in the U.S., they are useless, except as a public relations device for the legal profession. As noted by New York University Law Professor Harold I. Subin, they test “nothing relevant to the practice of law”:

The bar exam…. is good public relations for the legal profession. Most people are unaware that the exam tests nothing relevant to the practice of law and therefore feel that the organized bar is protecting clients against unqualified lawyers.

The bar exam is the final degradation ceremony through which one must pass to join what is sometimes called the legal fraternity…. The term is apt, with the bar exam serving the same socializing purpose as hazing [known in India as “ragging”]: drinking in useless legal data is the profession’s equivalent of swallowing goldfish or great quantities of beer, and leads on exam day to a similar regurgitative result.

Regarding the various complaints posted by various commentators, I recommend that you check out the cover story of LexisNexis’s latest legal magazine, which features SDD Global and addresses all of these issues in great detail, at http://www.sddglobal.com/lexis_article_with_footnotes.htm . This article demolishes all of the myths we have heard against legal outsourcing to India.

The malpractice suits that will happen when these outsourced legal works are challenged in courts and do not withstand judicial scrutiny (because they didn’t anticipate the nuances of the US legal system which is just different enough from India’s for this to happen) are going to be interesting to watch.

Note to all potential clients (corporate and individual0…demand more detailed bills and time sheets than you have been in the past. And the biggest firms are the biggest outsourcers so client beware.