Law Department Management Blog
A fertile, fact-filed post in Joy London’s blog, Excited Utterances, profiles some date from ValueNotes’ 68-page report, “Offshoring Legal Services to India.” That report states “legal services offshoring from India generates $61 million in revenues …” and “employs around 1,800 Indian professionals.” [If that figure of $34,000 per professional holds ($61MM divided by 1,800) and if they billed an average of only 1,200 hours a year, that would be about $28 per hour.]
Joy’s post lists 8 Indian entities that are referred to as “captive centers,” as they were founded by and run by law firms, 14 third-party “niche” legal vendors, and 16 entities that provide both legal and other kinds of support services.
As for law departments, the post has a fourth category for “corporate captives,” which are “in-house legal departments of companies like Allstate Insurance, American Express, Bayer, Cisco, DuPont, GE, Microsoft, Morgan Stanley, Oracle, Sun Technologies, and United Technologies.” To my knowledge, at least one of these law departments uses a vendor, not in-house Indian lawyers or other professionals.
For an example of a company that has retained one of the niche legal vendors and a compilation of obstacles perceived by some outside counsel to law departments using offshore resources, see the Fulton Country Daily Report, Dec. 13, 2005. (quoting Forrester Research’s statement that “12,000 legal jobs moved offshore” in 2004).