Legal Outsourcing to India Is Growing, but Still Confronts Fundamental Issues

With industry projections anticipating that $4 billion in legal work will move to India by 2015,  LPO companies are beginning to look towards India as a viable outsourcing market. Questions are being raised about the best way to market Indian lawyers and how to maintain the quality of work.

"Because of the newness of the field, Gregg Kirchhoefer, an outsourcing lawyer with Kirkland & Ellis who spoke at last week's LPO summit, said there were still no industry standards for how a mishap or mistake would be handled.

'With U.S. lawyers, you always have the rules of ethics,' he said. 'Going to a service provider offshore, you have to replace that gap-filler with contract.'

He said some outsourcing contracts go so far as to specify that Indian lawyers' computers could only have limited access to the Internet to prevent the inadvertent disclosure of documents."

This article appeared in its entirety in the January 23, 2008 edition of New York Law Journal.