Inflamed election-year rhetoric aside, outsourcing has
arrived. According
to Forrester Research, just over 40,000 lawyer jobs will be sourced abroad
by 2015 (about 8% of total projected lawyer employment). Financial
services and IT shops recognized the benefits of overseas staff in the
1990’s, and with their track record, corporate legal departments and
law firms—including the blue chip Milbank-Tweed, as reported by
my friend Jim Lantonio—are
following in their footsteps with increasing confidence.
What exactly
gets outsourced? As with all other sectors of the economy, first
the most-rote, least-value-added work, and then matters proceed to move
up the food chain. In Milbank’s case, they have started with basic
wordprocessing and document production, but other firms have contracted
out elementary drafting tasks and legal research.
Why now? Several reasons:
- as noted, other industries have paved the way, defanging the general
objection that it’s too radical a way to operate; - security, both from a technological and a trust standpoint, is now
up to snuff (often this is aided by mirroring sites located domestically); - increasing quality of the overseas services means they can compete
head-to-head with US-based equivalents (indeed, Jim Lantonio, the CIO
of Milbank, reports that an anonymous "satisfaction-reporting" system
gave overseas services higher marks than US-based).
Pockets of resistance of course remain: And the adoption rate
is farther along among F500 legal departments than AmLaw 100 firms. But
so long as clients’ experience with the Milbank’s of the world is superior
(based on cost, 24/7 availability, or both), the pressure to adopt similar
strategies will grow.
Despite the inarguable logic behind this trend, does that "8% of all
lawyers" figure strike you as a prediction more brutal than enlightened,
more threatening than inspiring? Then
consider this: Do you think you are in the top 92% of all lawyers?
Put
differently, do you aspire to spending your career doing work that
by hypothesis: (a) never involves client contact; (b) never really involves
interaction with colleagues; and (c) is suitable for the least-skilled
8% of all lawyers? I wonder how John Edwards would answer.
