At this past weekend’s Global Legal Skills IV Conference, held at Georgetown Law Center, my colleagues Anne Enquist, Mimi Samuel and I made a presentation on the outsourcing of legal services.  The most common reaction was disbelief.  “Well, yes, maybe corporations and law firms are outsourcing back office functions like document reviews, but are you sure that U.S. corporations and law firms are outsourcing legal research, the drafting of memos and briefs, and the drafting of contracts and patent applications?”

Our answer is, yes we are sure. While the numbers vary from source to source, almost every source suggests that the outsourcing of legal work is becoming big business – potentially generating revenues of $640 million by the end of 2010.

It’s not just one or two corporations or one or two law firms that are sending legal work offshore.  As of February 2008, there were 111 vendors providing outsourced legal services to 14 major corporations (including Dupont, Microsoft, and Motorola) and 10 law firms (including Clifford Chance and Milbank Tweed).

While initially, most of the outsourcing of legal work involved what most of us would label as “back office functions,” for example, data entry and document review and coding,  that is no longer true.   While outsourcing firms still provide those services, much of their business comes from doing legal research, from reviewing and drafting contracts and other agreements, from reviewing and drafting litigation documents, from doing patent research and drafting patent and application, and drafting briefs including two briefs that were submitted to the United States Supreme Court.

One of the reasons that some corporations and law firms give for outsourcing legal work is lower cost.  However, there are also other reasons.  For example, given the time difference, a U.S. attorney can assign the project to an Indian attorney at 5:00 p.m. New York time, the Indian attorney and work on the project while the New York attorney sleeps, having the project back on the New York attorney’s desk when she walks into work the next morning.  A more troubling reason, at least for those of use who are working with law students, is the issue of quality.  David Perla, one of the co-founders of legal outsourcer Pangea3, reports that some of his company’s U.S. clients held a “bakeoff” type competition in which they assigned the same projects to U.S. contract attorneys and Indian attorneys – and that the Indian attorneys “soundly trounced” the U.S. attorneys.

In future posts, we will explore some of the questions that logically follow from this discussion. For example, what is the effect of the ABA’s August 2008 opinion on the outsourcing of legal services?  How has the offshoring of legal services been affected by the current economic conditions?  What might a trend to offshore legal services mean for our students, our alums, clients, and, more generally, about how we think about the practice of law?