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After BPO, legal works moving to India
By siliconindia staff writer
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Monday, 17 January 2005, 20:30 IST
SAN JOSE– After Information Technology and BPO, India will now become a hot destination for outsourcing legal works for American firms.
Off shoring legal work is something new in the quickly changing world business, where white-collar jobs from software engineering to preparing tax documents are being outsourced to cheaper alternatives. Though it is still premature to say how big legal off shoring would become, more and more companies are exploring it.
Fed up of spending thousands of dollars an hour on expensive patent lawyers when his network infrastructure company gets into legal sword fights, Ajit Gupta, Chief Executive of Speedera looks towards India for cheaper alternatives.
"I'm willing to try anything that can reduce my costs," Gupta said adding, "We're a global company that focuses on the bottom line. We have to be competitive, even if it means taking some risks."
Cisco Systems had its technical writing done in India for some of its patent applications. So did Microsoft, who got patent research done in India and GE who worked with a legal team in India to draft contracts and other legal documents.
"ThereÂ’s a huge potential to be tapped and outsourcing can be at least 40 percent cheaper,Â’ said Sambamurthy, US representative of Nishith Desai Associates, Mumbai.
Some of the Silicon Valley companies too are enthused and are trying to tap the lucrative Indian legal off shoring business.
"It's not consistent with our past practices, but we certainly would be open to evaluating it," said an Intel spokesman.
IntelÂ’s overseas subsidiaries have relationships with foreign law firms, but its legal department hasn't sourced out work to offshore contractors yet. "The devil is in the details, the spokesman said. "It all depends on what kind of legal work we're doing, some of it wouldn't make sense."
Steven Lundberg, a lawyer specialising in intellectual-property issues, said his firm turned to India when it couldn't find enough qualified local talent to proofread patent applications.
"Since all our records are online, it was easy to send them over there," Lundberg added. "The quality and prices have been great." He expanded the offshore work to searches of public-records data, but drew the line at confidential client information.