Outsourcing Law

posted by Dave Hoffman

I recently received an email from an Indian firm advertising certain legal services. It raised a number of issues I hadn’t thought about before, so I’ll publish it after the jump and then offer a few comments.

Hi,

We are a professional legal organization based in New Delhi, India, and would like to offer our services for your legal research & documentation requirements. Having a large pool of qualified lawyers with extensive experience and expertise in handling legal assignments, we can work on the law of most countries, including the US, UK, Canada, Australia etc. We cater to both solo lawyers as well as law firms.

The proper budgeting of an attorney’s time can be a substantial factor in maintaining a successful legal practice. Outsourcing your legal requirements can give you what you need most - time. Whether it is a minor research project, cite checking an adversary’s brief, or if you simply just don’t have the resources, we are here to assist you. We will investigate the latest case law, statutes, administrative pronouncements and rulings, law review articles, and many other sources to find the information you need. In addition, we handle Federal Tax matters, Federal document location, and extensive searching of secondary sources. A few members of our team have been specially trained by US attorneys for handling legal assignments.

Research is done using both online and offline research tools.

India, as you may already be aware, is one of the most preferred outsourcing destinations for high-quality, low cost work, with excellent delivery schedules. Many lawyers and law firms are now outsourcing their legal research/documentation assignments to India. Not only do they achieve substantial cost savings, the availability of a large number of professionally trained lawyers also ensures high quality of work. We can serve you efficiently and cost effectively, and deliver as per your customized needs.

We are one of the leading Indian organizations in our field, and serve many international organizations. For accomplishing jobs with us, a team of highly trained and dedicated lawyers work at our state-of-the-art facilities. We understand the basic international business processes and ensure that all projects undertaken by us are completed within the stipulated time period with complete confidentiality, accuracy, and quality.

Our legal services are priced nominally at US$ 25 per hour. Details of the assignment can be sent to us via email, or via courier. We shall return the completed report to you within 72 hours, or earlier if you require. We are so confident that you will be satisfied with our services that we offer a `no-deposit’ policy. Entire payment can be made after receiving satisfactory delivery of service.

If you are interested in cutting your current costs to at least one-eighth, increasing your productivity without compromising on the quality and turn-around time, then please do get back to us. We can help you maximize your time and enhance your law practice.

We look forward to hearing back from you.

Sincerely,

Dhiraj Aggarwal

…

Disclaimer: We are an internet-based legal research organization. We only conduct legal research and do not provide any kind of legal advice, opinion or recommendation. While we have taken every effort to make the information on this site up-to-date, we cannot guarantee that the information is accurate or up-to-date. You are requested not to act upon the information on this site without obtaining professional counsel from an attorney. Any disputes arising out of or related to accessing of this site will be exclusively governed by the laws of Republic of India. You agree that any lawsuit arising out of or relating to the use of this site shall be filed exclusively in the courts located within New Delhi, India, and you hereby consent and submit to the jurisdiction of the courts situated within New Delhi, for the purposes of litigating any such lawsuit.

The services of EconomicalServices.com are only intended for those jurisdictions where they may be legally offered. This communication does not constitute an offer or solicitation to anyone in any jurisdiction in which such an offer or solicitation is not authorized or to any person to whom it is unlawful to make such a solicitation.

Well. In no particular order:

Do the disclaimers have bite? One major issue with outsourcing legal work overseas is private and public policing of the rules against unauthorized practice. I see no clear difference between “conduct[ing] legal search” and “providin[ing] … legal advice, opinion or recommendations.” Unauthorized practice is not, after all, limited to telling a client to do X. This firm will draft complaints or demurrers or even plain-vanilla memoranda. Simply because these memoranda aren’t directly sent to a client, but instead washed through another law firm, doesn’t make them non-legal services. Clearly, were such services offered by a domestic firm, the Bar would come down like a ton of bricks. (I say this without meaning to suggest that the attorneys for this particular firm lack credentials or intelligence. They probably are more than capable. But they aren’t members of a State bar.) In sum, I don’t think that the disclaimers would offer a real defense to an UP action. I am aware that many law firms have begun to outsource their paralegal/document processing work - but I was not aware that they were also outsourcing legal research. Obviously, they have gotten comfort from their insurers and ethics counsel, but still it is a surprising development.

The Dispute Resolution Clauses. Such clauses are presumptively enforceable. But if, say, a client sued a lawyer for malpractice and that lawyer joined the Indian firm, the clause would probably not stand up because litigating professional standard rules in Indian courts would confront strong state public policies. Even if the only parties to the lawsuit were the American and the Indian lawyers, I think a US court might have trouble with the choice of law clause, given the domestic interest in Bar regulation. Given this strong policy, why do the contracts attempt to advance an Indian forum and law? This is an interesting issue, connected to the larger puzzle of why parties generally choose contracting terms that are either unlawful or suboptimal. (See Choi and Gulati, for example. Maybe the idea is that choosing an Indian forum, by increasing the enforcement costs of the contract, selects for contracting parties who are either litigation-averse or who have particularly large contracts to trade.

Is Law a Portable Skill? In the International Dispute Resolution course I just finished teaching, I spent a great deal of time trying to push against the idea that domestic courts could do a decent job at interpreting other nations’ legal rules. The point I was trying to communicate was that legal research involves much more than just reading statutes or cases and looking for rules: learning any jurisdiction’s law requires you to get a sense of the deep structure of doctrine; its motivating policies, assumptions, and roots in history; the connections between rules in seemingly unrelated regimes; and the place of the law in society as a whole. To predict what a judge will do given a set of facts, you can’t simply read a bunch of cases naively: you need to approach them after having read hundreds of other cases over years. Maybe this is a conceit of someone who teaches law (a special pleading for the second and third years of law school) but I think it fundamentally unwise to trust client’s legal issues to foreign lawyers’ reading of domestic statutes, if those foreign lawyers have not had the pleasure of taking a domestic bar exam. Indeed, outsourcing law strikes me as a very easy way to commit malpractice.

(Photo Credit: Economical Services, the firm in question)

 July 8, 2007 at 7:55 pm   Posted in: Legal Ethics    Print This Post

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