Dupont’s major investment in offshore resources and million dollar savings

BusinessWeek, Issue 4001, Sept. 18, 2006 at 42 describes breathlessly Dupont’s use of R.R. Donnelly’s OfficeTiger for legal services performed in the Philippines and India. Some 30 Filipino attorneys, including three who have passed US bar exams, are teamed with 50 other staff on a massive litigation support effort. In Manila, while in India OfficeTiger staff “are helping out on more than a dozen projects, from monitoring old contracts and licensing agreements to managing documentary evidence for product-liability cases.”

According to the article, Dupont aims to save 40-to-60 percent “on document work and cut up to $6 million from its annual $200 million-plus in legal spending.” That statement suggests that DuPont would otherwise have spent at least $10 million on the services performed offshore, if the high-end 60 percent savings figure is assumed. DuPont “figures 70% of the labor in a typical insurance or liability case can be outsourced.” If savings of that dimension prove true, huge changes are in the offing for the US legal industry (See my post of Nov. 14, 2005 on Motorola and collected references to my other posts on offshoring.).