Canadian lawyers outsourcing to India

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Canadian lawyers outsourcing to India
JANICE TIBBETTS CANWEST NEWS SERVICE OTTAWA –
The Gazette, Montreal
04 Jul 2006

Canadian lawyers are quietly starting to outsource legal work to India, where they can pay substantially less per hour and enjoy a faster turnaround time than they would by paying junior lawyers in Canada.
Legal work, ranging from research for court cases to contract drafting and patent applications, is one of the newest services being sought offshore, following in the footsteps of such flourishing businesses as call centres, data processing and accounting.
India – with almost one million English-speaking lawyers trained in common law, the same type of law that is practised in Canada outside of Quebec – has been referred to in international business publications as “global counsel” because of its massive potential.
“It’s early days, but I would not think this is overblown rhetoric,” said Simon Chester, a Toronto lawyer and legal trend watcher, noting that sending legal work to India is thriving in the U.S. “If this model proves attractive to American businesses, there’s no reason it wouldn’t be attractive to Canadians,” he said.
The National, the in-house magazine of the Canadian Bar Association, recently published an article about the “commoditization” of legal services, and warned that Canadian lawyers may have no choice but to change their business practices to compete in a world where India is offering work at substantially reduced costs and clients can access do-it-yourself kits online to do such things as draft wills and, in the United States, obtain divorces.
Farming out legal work to the other side of the world, where companies say they provide hourly savings of up to 75 per cent, appears to be still in its infancy in Canada.
Two officials with companies in India said in interviews that they have about 10 clients between them and another outsourcing company reported it is talking to several interested Canadian companies. Clients are either law firms or the inhouse legal departments of large companies, not individual Canadians.
“Canada is where the United States was about 18 months ago,” said David Perla, one of two chief executive officers for the firm Pangea3, a Mumbai-based company that expects to employ 150 to 200 lawyers by the end of the year and 500 people by the 2010.
Pangea3, which provides savings of 30 to 75 per cent, depending on the service, has two Canadian clients and is talking with several interested companies, he said.
“Primarily smaller law firms are starting to embrace it, but we have had some inquiries from the Canadian legal departments of large... read more...