It is 5 p.m. and an attorney at a small Rhode Island practice is asked by a judge to provide a memo on a discrete section of the law by the next morning.
The lawyer has two options: One is to spend several hours that night writing the memo. The other, which increasingly is becoming an accepted alternative, is to outsource the work.
It is 2:30 a.m. in Mumbai, India, and by the next morning, an Indian lawyer can have the needed memo back in an e-mail.
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According to a report earlier this year put together by the Rhode Island Bar Association, outsourcing to large Indian firms is one of the most significant looming changes in the future of law practices.
At the RIBA annual meeting in June, S. Michael Levin, of counsel with Winograd, Shine & Zacks, chaired a seminar on the future of law that looked at that and other issues.
“Admittedly, a lot of this is being done by large firms … here in Rhode Island and larger firms around the country,” said Levin in an interview last week. “How that applies to smaller firms has not had its impact yet.”
Last year, the Bar Association surveyed about 400 of its members about what they see ahead for lawyers in Rhode Island. Their answers became the Committee of the Future of the Practice report, which was released in January. That report states that more than 75 percent of respondents “expressed some level of optimism” about the future of the profession in the state, while a majority of those who were pessimistic were “concerned about the possible negative impact of outsourcing.”
According to the report, only about 10 percent of Rhode Island firms were already outsourcing some element of their practice.
One issue of concern is the quality of return on outsourced work, said Thomas W. Lyons III, the immediate past president of the Bar Association and a partner with Strauss, Factor, Laing & Lyons. Although Lyons doesn’t outsource work, his colleagues have told him of mixed results.
“But you can get the same issue outsourcing in the United States, regarding quality, as in outsourcing to India,” he said. “What it comes down to is you have to check around for how happy folks are.”
Cost, too, is a factor in deciding to outsource. Lyons said an Indian lawyer might make between $6 and $12 per hour, while an American lawyer might charge anywhere from $70 to $1,000 per hour (though Rhode Island lawyers still shy away from high-end New York City rates).
For that reason, some believe that legal outsourcing might become a boom industry for India, which has already become a favorite for service outsourcing in other fields.
According to a CNN info-graphic that Lyons uses in presentations on the topic, about 40,400 legal jobs and $4.3 billion in wages might be outsourced by 2015.
“Even at the relatively conservative figure of 40,000 jobs, that would be over 5 percent of the number of lawyer jobs in the United States. It would represent about 250 law jobs in Rhode Island,” Lyons wrote in the report, although it is likely that larger cities would take a bigger hit, he said in an interview last week.
Admittedly, only some types of legal work are now being outsourced, said Lyons. Much of the legal work outsourced is work that even a first-year lawyer in the United States might not be asked to do, it is at such a low level.
The move toward outsourcing isn’t only being exacted by American lawyers; some companies in India are soliciting American firms. It’s even happening on a small scale: Last year, when Lyons began researching outsourcing in Rhode Island, he received an e-mail from a young lawyer with her résumé attached. She was an Indian lawyer living in Rhode Island.
“She came in, and we were chatting about what the differences and similarities were between the Indian and American legal systems,” said Lyons. “There are a lot of similarities – they practice in English, they receive the same kind of education that we do.”
The woman’s husband was an engineer working for GTECH Corp., and she’d only be in Rhode Island for a few years.
“And she said, ‘What I’d really like to do is make as many contacts as I can, so that when I go back to India I can get outsourced legal work,’ ” said Lyons.
According to the Bar Association report, the other biggest issue that Rhode Island lawyers expect to face is evolving technology. Michael Fontaine, of Fontaine Law Offices, said he expects there will eventually be an almost paperless legal environment. Programs such as HotDocs that make it easier to create PDFs are lessening the need for paper documents.
“Say you have a secretarial staff. It allows them to spend less time creating those documents, which allows them more time to do other things,” said Fontaine. “And scanning documents to go paperless is speeding up the discovery process.”
Technological advances are also dramatically lowering storage costs. What once fit into an entire filing cabinet can now be stored on a single CD.
“When people get more confident with backup systems, I think it will be eventually completely paperless,” said Fontaine, “other than printing something up that you need for court that day.” •
