Eben,

I started to write a response, but then went to the link provided by Makalika. This quote summarizes what I wanted to say:

"Instead, offshoring is likely to hit low-level work typically performed by legal assistants, paralegals and possibly even junior lawyers who cut their teeth on rote assignments."

At big firms, I read this as doc review. With the current ABA rules in place, how would overseas firms would be able to provide the same sort of transactional and litigation services in the U.S. that U.S. firms provide without hiring American lawyers at American salaries?

Further, isn't a substantial portion of document review already outsourced to temps? Just typing "temp doc review" into google yields pages of job postings and comments about how awful the work is. My point is that since much of this work is already outsourced to graduates whose employment prospects were poor from their respective schools, how does moving it overseas negatively impact the large firms? Additionally, if the above is true, it seems like the impact will be more at the bottom than the top.

Finally, if large firms are limiting their outsourcing to doc review, how does this mean the "death" of big firms? It seems as though quite the opposite is true: big firm partners stand to greatly increase profits per partner by paying a lawyer in India $10/hour to review documents instead of hiring an American temp agency.

Is your point that, over time, more and more work will become outsourced and that eventually clients will feel comfortable having Indian lawyers conduct M&A deals (for example) from New Delhi? It seems as though the necessary radical shift in client perception as well as the difficulty in overcoming the inertia of the legal "guild" would mean that such a change would take somewhat longer than 10 years.

Thoughts?

-- SandorMarton - 22 Jan 2008