Are all our legal jobs getting outsourced? Is this the sort of wall Donald Trump should really be building? It may sound hard to believe, but the outsourcing of legal work is already well underway, moving beyond the fly-over country warehouses of discovery vendors to the subcontinent. Lawyers in India have seized Biglaw discovery work and they’re not letting go.
A couple months ago, we took a trip to ILTACON, the annual meeting of the International Legal Technology Association to see what all the hubbub was about. We saw some insightful panels, learned a lot about artificial intelligence, and failed to catch some rare Pokémon. We also got the opportunity to sit down with several senior leaders at Thomson Reuters for an informal and wide-ranging chat about the future of law, including the role Indian lawyers are playing in the future of ediscovery and the legal industry writ large.
So we invited Ed Sohn, VP at Thomson Reuters Legal Managed Services (and Above the Law columnist) to elaborate on this subject.
[Note: Thomson Reuters itself doesn’t practice law in India, they provide services under the supervision of American lawyers. But Sohn knows the law schools and law firm landscape and was able to fill us in.]
It’s a subject impossible to broach without tackling the broader political hot potato of outsourcing in America. Sohn quickly noted that he would never take the position that all outsourcing is universally “good” or “bad,” but that, especially in the services sector, where there are global challenges outsourcing is not a bad policy.
Citing Pangea3 co-founder Sanjay Kamlani, Sohn noted that the best way to think about outsourcing in the legal sector is as an access to justice issue. Perhaps it’s not the same as a poor inmate seeking counsel, but Kamlani’s point is that smaller companies historically don’t have the wherewithal to fight high stakes civil litigations and risked going under and, in this way, providing a low cost alternative for one of the core litigation expenses is actually saving jobs by giving these companies an opportunity to stay in business.
But what of the domestic contract attorney? The often debt-ridden law grad, perhaps laid off in the last recession and unable to find full-time, long-term work? Sohn thinks this raises a false dichotomy. He notes that many ediscovery vendors — including Thomson Reuters — maintain domestic ediscovery work and that the industry continues to grow onshore. In his experience, it’s not that expanding work in India has replaced domestic contract attorneys as much as expanded capacity to match a continuously growing need.
Is there a risk that outsourcing could start to replace U.S. contract attorney jobs? It’s certainly possible — though hard to imagine when those jobs are already going for $8/hour — but Sohn reminds that the labor arbitrage that exists today won’t be there forever. “It’s not going to change tomorrow, or next year, or even in 10 years… but it may well be gone in 15 years.”
Plus, there are a number of clients who still cling to the notion that security requires American-based attorneys. According to Sohn, this is just isn’t true, and the more clients investigate Indian discovery operations, the more comfortable they will become. “It’s basically a clean room,” Sohn explains. Fingerprint scanners, video monitoring… Ethan Hunt would have to drop from the ceiling to get access to some secretary’s emailed birthday plans.
Even more impressive than the technological security Thomson Reuters employs is its human security. Indian lawyers are so diligent about security concerns, that they lock up their computers if they see people coming down the hall that they aren’t on the case — even if they work for the same company. Sohn relayed a personal account of stepping up from his desk for a moment and returning to find the company’s internal security people had already publicly chastised him for walking away from his screen without locking it. That’s some harsh security to drop a dime on a VP.
Where does Thomson Reuters find its Indian lawyers? This was, perhaps, the most fascinating aspect of our discussion. While India is, like the United States, a common law jurisdiction, how the country approaches legal education and employment is wildly different.
Even if lawyers in India could take jobs with a outsourcing firm, why would they jump at these opportunities instead of a more traditional practice? The answer to that question goes back to the country’s long history of nepotism. The legal industry in India caps law firm partnership numbers, a holdover regulation that keeps international megafirms from muscling in, but it also keeps many firms strictly family affairs. Another quirk of the Indian legal system that works in favor of Thomson Reuters, who offers upward mobility to stellar law grads that they don’t necessarily have elsewhere in the private sector.
That’s why the next time your firm works with a vendor in India, you can’t let a bundle of archaic prejudices get in the way — these are bright, highly-motivated attorneys with a commitment to quality and security. Add in the cost savings to clients and it’s clear even more work is going to be going to India in the coming years.
Putting aside the cost-of-living, is there any other advantage India has in producing low-cost lawyers? Well, not putting them in crippling debt helps. Law school in India is a “4 + 1” system — undergraduate studies in law are followed by an additional year. Coupled with already reduced tuition — estimated to be around $5K including room and board — this streamlined program India produces graduates primed to work for wages that comparable American graduates may not be prepared to accept.
In the end, that’s the whole challenge for the legal industry in America in a nutshell isn’t it? Just one more reason to get serious about American law school tuition reform — it’s actually going to start costing jobs.
Joe Patrice is an editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.