Today we sat down with Gururaj Potnis, director of Manthan Legal, who was in New York to attend a legal conference. Manthan is an Indian company that describes itself as a “leader of offshore Legal Process Outsourcing.” According to Potnis, Manthan has roughly 280 lawyers — 140 senior attorneys, and 140 more junior colleagues who do paralegal-type work — and they stand ready to help law firms cut costs (and increase profits).

Potnis thinks a “tectonic shift” is taking place in the legal industry, and he believes his company is well-positioned to take advantage of the new market. According to him, he’s got law firm clients on his side: “For the first time, the large law firms are being asked by their customers: ‘Are you efficient?’” The market change that we are now seeing “is 99% being driven by customers.”

Manthan Legal is positioned differently from its Indian competitors in legal outsourcing. It works primarily for law firms rather than in-house counsel:

Right now, 90% of the [outsourcing] industry is being driven by corporate counsel [i.e., in-house lawyers]. At some point in time, they’ve been exposed to the concept of having to get the maximum amount of work from the minimum budget….

[I]n the short term, the corporate counsel will drive [the outsourcing trend]. But in the long term, the law firms will have to develop an alternate billing model.

And under these alternative billing models, outsourcing may have an important role to play.

What can outsourcing firms offer? Junior associates might not like it, but managing partners will have to start paying attention. More after the jump.

Facebook, Facebook, Facebook. It’s all over the news these days due to a spate of lawsuits. If we weren’t so into Facebook, we might be over it. It’s way overexposed.

Anyway, here’s one of the latest suits. This one is near and dear to our hearts, as it concerns one of our favorite procrastination tools Facebook applications: Scrabulous. From the Associated Press:

The Indian creators of a Scrabble knock-off that has become one of the most popular activities on Facebook have been sued by Hasbro, the company that owns the word game’s North American rights.

You might think this will give you the opportunity to break your Scrabulous habit and stop wasting so much time on Facebook. Not so fast — Hasbro conveniently launched its own version and hopes to keep you hooked:

The suit against Scrabulous’s creators comes less than two weeks after the release of an authorized version of Scrabble for Facebook.

Hasbro said in its lawsuit that Scrabulous violates its copyright and trademarks. Separately, Hasbro asked Facebook to block the game.

(Lat, let’s not start a new game until they figure this out. I shall savor my recent victory for now.)

More Facebook legal news, and a reason to create a Facebook profile if you haven’t already, after the jump.

Jobs moving from the first world to the third world has been a trend for quite a few years now. Originally in manufacturing and call centers, the cheap services offered abroad are starting to get more specialized, such as tax preparation and even local journalism.

We wrote last year about how clients are putting pressure on law firms to outsource basic legal tasks to Indian lawyers with hourly rates of $20. A recent Washington Post article sounds the outsourcing alarm again for lawyers. It says the kind of legal work being sent to India is expanding rapidly:

Indian workers who once helped with legal transcription now offer services that include research, litigation support, document discovery and review, drafting of contracts and patent writing. The industry offers an attractive career path for many of the 300,000 Indians who enroll in law schools every year. India and the United States share a common-law legal system rooted in Britain’s, and both conduct proceedings in English.

If Hollywood is in on the trend, then you know there’s trouble, since all important trends start in California.

“Ninety percent of a lawyer’s work is legal research and drafting, and all this can now be offshored to India,” said Russell Smith, who worked in a Manhattan law firm called SmithDehn before moving to India to set up an outsourcing company in 2006. “A large portion of our fees in the U.S. is because of office rent. It is often a big decision to hire one attorney in the U.S. In India, we can hire 10 at a time and train them all at once.”

Smith’s Indian company, SDD Global Solutions, handled much of the legal work for the film “Borat.” Other clients include the Washington-based firm Appleton & Associates and U.S. movie studios and television networks.

“My people in India can do everything from here, except sign the opinion letter and appear in an American court,” he said.

Smith’s Indian office recently researched and drafted the motion papers for the dismissal of a libel case against the producers of HBO’s “Da Ali G Show.” Smith said that if it had not been for the cheaper option of outsourcing, the producers would have settled.

On the upside, the article talks about one persisting need for American lawyers: to train Indian lawyers. Indian lawyers tend to write in “flowery, British-style English,” and need to be “retrained to write in crisp, short sentences.” Better get working on those writing skills.

U.S. Legal Work Booms in India [Washington Post]

Do you have a Scrabulous problem? Are you addicted to the online version of Scrabble, which you can play via Facebook?

We had a Scrabulous addiction for a while, until we forswore the game. We’re finishing up current games; in fact, we just scored a bingo right before posting this (“OPERATED” — see board at right). But we are not starting or participating in new matches.

If you’ve been finding your own productivity impaired by Scrabulous, however, you may not need to give up the application. It may be taken out of your hands, over your protest. From the BBC:

Facebook has been asked to remove the Scrabulous game from its website by the makers of Scrabble. The Facebook add-on has proved hugely popular on the social network site and regularly racks up more than 500,000 daily users. Lawyers for toy makers Hasbro and Mattel say Scrabulous infringes their copyright on the board-based word game.

The move has sparked protests by regular fans of Scrabulous keen to keep the add-on running. Scrabulous is currently one of Facebook’s ten most popular applications - little programs that Facebook members can add to the profiles they maintain on the site….

The Scrabulous add-on was not created by Facebook but was built for the site by Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla - software developers based in Kolkata.

Apparently Hasbro and Mattel don’t look kindly on outsourcing to India — unlike, say, law firms. We’ll keep you posted about the fate of this game.

Facebook asked to pull Scrabulous [BBC]

The law firm of Seyfarth Shaw cordially invites its associates… to toast their own obsolescence. Check out the invite below, for “a cocktail reception to welcome the group of attorneys visiting from Manthan Services in Bangalore, India.”

Our tipster wonders: “Why pay first-years $160,000 a year for legal research (or document review), when you can use a lawyer from India at a fraction of the cost?”

Earlier: Nationwide Worldwide Pay Raise Watch: Mumbai to $8,160?

Multiple readers sent us this article, from Bloomberg News:

Bruce Masterson, chief operating officer of Socrates Media LLC, asked his outside counsel to customize a residential lease for all 50 U.S. states in 2003. The firm’s estimate: about $400,000. He rejected that price tag and hired QuisLex, in Hyderabad, India, which did it for $45,000.

“It was good quality,” said Masterson, whose Chicago-based company publishes legal forms on the Internet. “We’ve been working together ever since.”

Clients are pushing law firms like Jones Day and Kirkland & Ellis to send basic legal tasks to India, where lawyers tag documents and investigate takeover targets for as little as $20 an hour. The firms are reacting to a trend that will move about 50,000 U.S. legal jobs overseas by 2015, according to Boston- based Forrester Research Inc.

Biglaw partners may soon be telling associates: “If you don’t think $160,000 is enough to review documents for 2200 hours a year, fine. We’ll just ship your job off to India, where ‘Biff’ and ‘Jenny’ will be happy to be document drones — for under $9,000 a year. And if I have a problem with my laptop, they can help me with that too!”

Jones Day, Kirkland Send Work to India to Cut Costs [Bloomberg News]

* Who let the dogs fight? Who? Who? Feds say: football star Michael Vick. [CNN; TSG]

* Bar-Bri class reps (no, different class reps): No incentive payments for you. [The Recorder]

* Seven-figure legal bills: par for the course for white-collar criminal defendants. [WSJ Law Blog]

* India market hot for law firms. [Law.com]

* Billionaire Siebel gets California Supreme Court’s ok to sue lawyer and judge despite settlement. [The Recorder]

* UK girl loses fight to wear purity ring at school. Chastity belt still under review. [MSNBC]

* Ohio Turnpike murder-for-hire case could result in death sentence. [CNN]

Yet another article on unhappy lawyers: This time it’s from the UK, where it seems the legal profession has lost its “lustre.”

Nearly a quarter of you want to quit. In a desperately competitive recruitment market, that’s just about the last thing law firm managers need to hear.

Shocking? Yes. Not many apparently sought-after professions have a quarter of their members wanting to quit. The whole issue of work-life balance has now, surely, reached a tipping point - and not just for overworked associates who are looking for a way out.

Thirty one per cent of associates would like to leave the law; 20 per cent of partners would happily quit; 22 per cent of barristers fancy a change; and a hefty 29 per cent of in-house counsel would like a life outside the law.

There’s more on the survey from the Financial Times, which notes that UK salaries have gone up by 15 percent or more recently.

Meanwhile, in India, young lawyers are disillusioned by a cumbersome litigation system, with its “interminable procedural delays” and outright drudgery: “Many young lawyers complained that they only ended up carrying briefs for the senior counsels during their stint.”

Lawyers bitching about their jobs: the universal language.

Not sure how we feel about this development:

For years, outsourcing has been a dirty word inside the world of white-shoe law firms…. A number of large law firms, though, are starting to tiptoe onto far-flung shores.

The latest is Clifford Chance, one of the largest law firms in the world with 29 offices in 20 countries, which will announce plans today to consolidate and move big chunks of its administrative functions like accounting and technological support to an operation in Delhi, India, by next spring.

Ah yes, Clifford Chance — already renowned for its spectacular associate morale.

We’re sure CC associates will love it when their computer freezes up at 2 a.m. the night before a closing, they call the dubiously-named “Help Desk,” and they spend 45 minutes trying to explain the problem to an Indian woman who insists that yes, she really IS named “Rhonda.”

On the other hand, outsourcing all boring tasks could be good for law firm associates over the long term. Can Bangladeshis be trained to conduct due diligence?

Law Firms Are Starting to Adopt Outsourcing [New York Times via How Appealing]
Outsourcing: Everybody’s Doing It, Even Law Firms [WSJ Law Blog]
Clifford Chance LLP: Associates’ Concerns [Internal Memos]