A global career for India's lawyers

From The Economic Times

The legal profession in India has expanded to new dimensions and is no more confined to conventional bar practice. It is clear that the offshore outsourcing of legal services to India, commonly although perhaps misleadingly, referred to as legal process outsourcing (LPO), is a fast-growing industry. The Trade Policy Review of India tabled at WTO in April this year terms this phenomenon as “offshore outsourcing of legal services” and estimates the market potential for offshore legal services from the US alone at $3-4 billion. Legal professionals are enthusiastic, optimistic, yet curious about the nature and scope of offshore legal work provided from India.

BPO, FPO, KPO, LPO, PPO, RPO — this growing list of acronyms has led to a stereotypical perception that businesses, eager to ride the outsourcing wave, are constantly being set up to process just about everything under the sun in this supposedly flat world. This generalised view, however, falls flat when one takes a closer look at what these companies actually do.

There are significant differences even amongst companies that are ostensibly clubbed together under the same acronym. In the offshore legal services or LPO space, for example, the gamut of services offered by different providers varies from indexing and coding to database maintenance, patent support, contract review and management, litigation support, legal compliance, research and drafting, content generation and combinations thereof. Low-hanging fruit such as patent support work, indexing of legal documents and legal transcription do not necessarily require to be performed by lawyers and are generally not provided by 'pure-play' legal service providers like Mindcrest.

Clients of offshore legal services companies are primarily international law-firms and legal departments of multinational corporations. Lawyers who do this work are trained on specific aspects of the laws of the jurisdictions in which their clients operate. Their knowledge of Indian laws is indeed helpful as India's legal system is based on the principles of common law.

Offshore legal services companies aim at providing excellent client service based on the application of legal skills by dedicated teams of lawyers, a process-driven approach, quality assurance of work product, timely response and the ability to scale what is essentially subjective, analysis driven work. Many such providers are increasingly functioning as extensions of corporate legal departments and law firms.
Until now, corporate India has employed lawyers to perform a necessary support function. The advent of offshore legal services has presented India's lawyers the opportunity to take their place at the heart of the organisation and to be directly responsible for its success. Lawyers in these companies are provided a secure and stable work environment with world class infrastructure and progressive HR policies, where the opportunities for career enhancement are based solely on merit, like in any healthy corporate structure. Offshore legal services companies help motivated lawyers develop multiple layers of skills that go well beyond the application of their legal knowledge.

The application and integration of state-of-the-art technology gives lawyers an edge over their counterparts in conventional legal practice. Traditional geographic boundaries of client service are now passé, affording lawyers the enviable opportunity to demonstrate their professional skills in a global context as never before. Direct interaction with overseas clients on their laws lends a new dimension to lawyers' understanding of legal practice in other countries, not to mention an enhanced multicultural sensitivity and development of their communication skills, written and oral.

A systematic, process-driven approach to performing legal services, often requiring lawyers to work in teams with their peers, sharpens their people and time management skills. It is a fact that today lawyers in India manage global legal projects that have team sizes of more than 100 lawyers. The variety of services being currently performed and other emergent specialised areas of legal service continue to increase the repertoire of lateral skills that India's lawyers now to bring to bear for their world-wide clients.

The offshore legal services industry is poised for enormous growth. Much of this appears in the news media and is heard at various seminars and conferences around the country. Exponential projections of industry estimates compete for hyperbole with the intensity perhaps not dissimilar to that of a fortune teller's gaze into a crystal ball. Even so, it is accurate to say that credible players in this industry have collectively just scratched the surface of the immense potential that lies ahead.

As a lawyer looking to be part of an exciting and promising future, a career as a global legal professional is a compelling option that is here to stay.