Contracts for outsourced services were infrequent as found by a recent survey

Of a group of respondents to the ALM Legal Intelligence survey last year, 75 answered a question regarding whether they had “contracted during the last fiscal year with any legal service providers (or vendors) to provide outsourced services.” Of them, 48 said “no” they had not and 23 said “yes.” For those 23 who had contracted for outsourced legal services, 5 of them designated “off-shore” arrangements.

In other words, out of the survey population, less than one out of ten said they had gone off-shore for some legal-related services during the past year. The survey did not ask about the scale of those offshore services obtained nor the kinds of services so we really don’t know much. What we do know, however, is that from a reasonably sized sample of U.S. companies, there was no enormous sucking sound of legal work going offshore.