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shoes made. He insists the workmanship can't be matched in the United States, nor can the price. "These are
the most comfortable shoes I've ever worn," he said of a pair of leather loafers he had on recently.
Steinberg, who was standing in his office in Noida, a high-tech suburb of New Delhi, is not in the shoe
business. He believes he's found another product that can be made in India at high quality and low cost: legal
services. His 1 1/2-year-old company, Intellevate, specializes in intellectual property work. Its staff, about
one-fifth of them lawyers, prepares patent applications and conducts technical research on intellectual
property questions. Among its clients are the legal departments of Fortune 500 companies.
The market for outsourced legal work is expected to reach $163 billion by next year, and India is positioned
to seize the largest share. The time difference between India and the United States allows for work to be done
overnight, and many people in India's enormous workforce are college-educated and English-speaking.
Intellevate recently placed a want ad for a patent researcher in the Times of India, the leading
English-language daily. The company received 1,700 résumés. "There are 200 million English-speaking,
college-educated Indians and there are not 200 million jobs," Steinberg said. Such a disparity in supply and
demand allows his company to hire credentialed, capable labor, cheaply. "We're not selling shoes," Steinberg
likes to say. "We're selling cobblers."
Puneet Mohey, president of a legal outsourcing company called Lexadigm on the other side of town, has a more
straightforward pitch: "We provide large-law-firm-quality work at literally one-third the price." Lexadigm's
rates range from $65 to $95 an hour for work that large U.S. firms might bill at $250 an hour or more. Nearly
all the employees at Mohey's company are lawyers.
With outsourcing, those who are not members of an American bar are supervised, and their work vouched for, by
someone who is. "To the extent that what you have them do is legal research for U.S. firms, it's not much
different than having law students do it," said George Washington University Law School professor Thomas
Morgan, a scholar of professional responsibility.
Some of the dozen or so outsourcing companies that have sprung up over the last decade in India focus on
low-level paralegal work–keeping track of filing dates and document reviews. But Intellevate and Lexadigm
prefer to take on more sophisticated work like patent applications and appellate briefs because the work
commands higher rates from clients. Lexadigm recently drafted its first brief for a U.S. Supreme Court case,
involving the application to a tax dispute of the Fifth Amendment's due process clause. The brief will
ultimately be filed by an American law firm, which can use all, part, or none of Lexadigm's work–the same as
if the draft had been written by one of its own associates.
With the work being done in India becoming more sophisticated, some American attorneys are skeptical of
American firms that use outsourced legal services. "I think a lawyer has a responsibility over his work and he
just can't delegate it," said former ABA president Jerome Shestack, now the head of litigation at the
Philadelphia firm of Wolf, Block, Schorr and Solis-Cohen. "The problem with outsourcing is, how do you keep
control over it? How do you see how it's being done?"
OUTSOURCING LEGAL WORK TO INDIA began in 1995, when the 34-lawyer, Dallas-based litigation firm of Bickel &
Brewer opened an office in Hyderabad. Co-founder and co-managing partner Bill Brewer, who is 53 years old,
explained that the idea was hatched when he was out to brunch with a relation by marriage. The relative, C. S.
Prasada Rao, was originally from India. "We were looking for new ways to be more efficient in handling the
millions of pieces of information that confront us in each case. I'm not sure how it came out of the
conversation but somewhere a light went off. I asked, 'You can have a lawyer for how much an hour in India?'
He said, 'Two dollars an hour.' We didn't make it to dinner before we were setting up the subsidiary in
India."
Bickel & Brewer has since spun off its Hyderabad office, run by Rao, into a separate company called Imaging &
Abstract International, which handles work for Bickel & Brewer as well as other American clients. In 2001,
General Electric added a legal division to a currently existing base of operations in India to handle legal
compliance and research for two of its divisions, GE Plastics and GE Consumer Finance.
While it has become commonplace to outsource call centers for customer service and diagnostic offices for
medical imaging, American companies tend to be reticent about sending legal work overseas to outsourcing
firms. Third-party outsourcing companies, like Intellevate and Lexadigm, are secretive about their client
lists, concerned about a backlash from workers or customers in the U.S. According to Leon Steinberg, one
Intellevate client company was paranoid about its Intellevate agreements becoming public because it was
fearful of how its labor unions would feel about the use of Indian labor. "In our contract with them, it says
we will not divulge that they are a client without their advanced written consent," Steinberg explained. "The
next sentence says we will not seek their advanced written consent."
Even Microsoft, which has been widely reported to be using Intellevate for patent research, declined to
discuss the company beyond confirming that Microsoft is a client and issuing a statement that "[as] a global
company, we are constantly working to improve our ability to serve our customers worldwide in the most cost
effective, efficient manner."
Given this reluctance to discuss outsourcing, convincing a potential client to accept even a free sample can
take months of lobbying. Intellevate offers to prepare at no fee a mock patent application for firms it
courts, but this offer is often declined. Steinberg has been forced to resort to more aggressive tactics.
Eighteen months after applications are filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, they become public
record. Steinberg recently had Intellevate's Indian staff comb through a company's latest USPTO applications
for errors. When they found some, one of them serious, Steinberg contacted the large D.C. law firm that had
filed the application. He flashed a devious smile recounting a partner's response to his unsolicited help:
"This is outrageous." If the mistake doesn't convince the D.C. firm to work with Intellevate, Steinberg said,
"there's nothing stopping us from sending it to the corporation."
AT LEXADIGM, ATTORNEYS' SALARIES range from $6,000 to $36,000. The employees, whose résumés lead off with LLMs
from top U.S. law schools and are studded with internships at the World Trade Organization in Geneva and
apprenticeships at the Indian Supreme Court, would earn six-figure salaries at elite U.S. law firms. But the
education visas most of these young attorneys used to study in the United States allow for only one year of
work after graduation, so most have to return to India to find jobs.
The disparity in salaries makes this seem like a more heroic sacrifice than it is. The lifestyle a Lexadigm or
Intellevate salary buys is in many ways more lavish than an American attorney's. (And more than an Indian
attorney's–Intellevate employees make 40 percent more than new associates at corporate law firms in India;
many left such jobs to come to Intellevate.) Savinda Gupta is a 2004 graduate of Delhi University's law school
who works below her education level as a paralegal at Intellevate's office. Gupta, who wore a drab khaki
sweater highlighted by a bright pink shawl, called a dupatta, thrown across her shoulders, employs three
part-time servants, one of whom washes her two cars daily. "Everybody does it," she said. "Delhi is very
dusty."
While the plight of underpaid legal researchers is unlikely to be the next cause célébre for the
anti-sweatshop movement, legal outsourcing, whispered about now, is likely to become a hotly debated topic in
American law soon. For now, third-party outsourcers like Intellevate and Lexadigm remain popular mostly with
corporate legal departments, which use outsourcing to keep costs down. Large law firms have been slower to
send work to overseas outsourcers.
But what if they were to come around? Thomas Morgan, the professional responsibility expert, says bar
association ethics rules require law firms to pass on to clients cost savings from outsourcing. In theory, at
least, it would take only one big firm looking for a competitive advantage to start a bidding war that could
change the cost of buying legal advice in the U.S.
In the meantime, outsourcing firms continue to find resourceful ways to improve their product. English is the
language of business in India, but not of common parlance; written Indian English has retained much of its
Raj-era formality. Not far from the offices of a legal outsourcing company in Mumbai called Mindcrest, a sign
over a busy intersection reads, "Jaywalking Is Injurious to Your Health." To help their employees learn to
write simple, direct, American sentences, the company has begun giving all its new hires Hemingway's The Old
Man and the Sea. A strategy an expatriate could appreciate.
Check out for more Offshore outsourcing work click on here
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About the Author
An Eminent writer in various popular newspaper and also a webmaster of various popular company