another example of the Credit Card industry's deceptive advertising targeting children
cartoon of the month

Friday, June 10, 2005

Indian lawyers become BPO slaves

Its really alarming for the state of affairs of data security and iinformation technology protection if Indian Lawyers are reduced to slaving away for US BPOs.
Indian legal eagles wing their way to BPOs
LAXMI DEVI

INDIATIMES NEWS NETWORK[ THURSDAY, JUNE 09, 2005 12:55:01 AM]

I started my career three years back with just Rs 2,000 under a senior advocate in Delhi. I had a tough time to manage a decent life with that kind of money," laments Swati Arora who is currently handling the legal outsourcing division in one of the leading business process outsourcing (BPO) firms in Gurgaon.

Similarly a fresh graduate from Delhi University shares her career plans: "My dream is to become a top-notch lawyer like P Chidambaram or Harish Salve or Kapil Sibal. But it will take my entire life to reach those heights.

I shall not work like my seniors for less money and slog my butt till late night. So I plan to take the BPO route because I heard they pay well. I have no hassles working for such firms and still maintain my designation as lawyer."

The web of outsourcing has enmeshed the legal service too with a host of BPOs offering white-collar legal services to their foreign clients.

"There is a major revolution in the legal industry and the demand for paralegal is exploding. The legal outsourcing is expected to cross $2 bn by 2010. And it is projected that India can become the legal back office of the world," says Atul Jalan, CEO, Manthan Services, Bangalore .

Manthan started its legal services in 2003, and has grown in a short span to a team of 120 people with over 80 lawyers. It provides legal solutions in domains of conveyancing, legal research, intellectual property, litigation support, personal injury and bankruptcy.

Outsourcing legal work in India began in 1995, when the 34-lawyer, Dallas-based litigation firm of Bickel & Brewer opened an office in Hyderabad. Co-founder and co-managing partner Bill Brewer, explained that the idea was hatched when he was out to brunch with an Indian relative.

"We were looking for new ways to be more efficient in handling the millions of pieces of information that confront us in each case. Somewhere I asked, 'You can have a lawyer for how much an hour in India?' My relative said, 'Two dollars an hour.' We didn't make it to dinner before we were setting up the subsidiary in India."

Bickel & Brewer has since spun off its Hyderabad office into a separate company called Imaging & Abstract International, which handles work for Bickel & Brewer as well as other American clients. In 2001, General Electric added a legal division to a currently existing base of operations in India to handle legal compliance and research for two of its divisions, GE plastics and GE consumer finance.

Some of the dozen of outsourcing companies that have sprung up over the last decade in India are focusing on low-level paralegal work - keeping track of filing dates and document reviews.

"India's lumbering justice system may be a dread to its citizens but is on its way to becoming the darling of US and UK-based law firms," says Arora who got promoted recently, has a good pay package with other perks and benefits.

According to a recent study by researchers at the University of California at Berkeley, legal assistants and paralegals working in India on behalf of US law firms earn, on average, between $6 and $8 per hour. That's about one-third of what their counterparts in the US are paid.

"The work being outsourced is not only legal; nor is it only secretarial. It is a mix of core legal work like research, and secretarial works like preparing drafts and letters. The services vary from the type of clients who outsource the work. The legal executives of many multi-national corporations get hardcore legal work done in India," says Shailesh Vikram Singh, MD, Indialegal.net which is part of Escorts Finance Ltd, Delhi.

What legal services are outsourced?

Broadly, the work outsourced offshore can be classified into four categories based on complexity and skill base required.

. The first category involves content work including editing and transcription.

. The second category involves conversion from one format, say, from a word document to XML or legal XML.

. Legal research involves case histories, judgment, and finally client briefs going up to the penultimate stage of a petition submitted to the court.

. Legal transcription involves interviews with clients or witnesses by lawyers.

Some of the other overseas firms like Oracle, Sun and Cisco have been outsourcing their patent research and documentation work to Indian firms or to their captive centres in the country. Even foreign law firms say Allen & Overy and Hammonds Direct are working as third party service providers.

"Most of the outsourcing of legal work seems to be coming to India because English is spoken here. Moreover Indian law is based on British law which is prevalent in majority of commonwealth countries," says Vikram Singh. He goes on to add: "However we provide requisite training in US laws and legal writing."

The fact that the legal profession is not very remunerative in India except for in the top level and the abundance of law graduates is helping India to emerge as the hub of outsourcing business in legal services. "It is creating a lot of interest in the youngsters and experienced lawyers too. There are people who are non-lawyers entering this field, especially in the patent sector," says Sridhar Suryanarayan, CEO, Prolifus, which started operating only eight months back in Delhi.

"The opportunities are immense, but India needs to move cautiously," says Jyothi Mendiratta, a lawyer practicing in Delhi High Court. "Concerns over data security and service quality will be extremely important. There are fears that intellectual property and data may not always be tamper-proof within Indian territory."

For the vast majority of India's annual 298,000 law graduates, BPOs may become the ticket to jump on to the wagon of fat pay packets and a better life.