The US legal market size was in the region of $200 bn in ’04. By end of ’04, over 12,000 legal jobs were expected to shift to low-cost countries, mainly India, according to Forrester Research. Forrester estimates this number to triple by 2010, and further double by 2015, thus leading to more than 80,000 jobs shifting to India by 2015.

Industry experts state that the outsourced work is not only legal; nor is it only secretarial. It is a mix of the two. For trained in-house lawyers of overseas corporations, it is hardcore legal work while for businesses that service overseas law firms, it ranges from indexing and scanning documents, word processing, legal transcription, coding, converting physical data into electronic form, digital dictation, to reviewing transactional and litigation documents, drafting contracts, research memoranda and due diligence reports, prosecuting patents, surveying laws of various jurisdictions, and collecting debt. For international publishers, it is interpreting and classifying US court decisions, possibly even writing "head notes".

Indian advocates do not fight the case directly in US courts. Sitting thousands of miles away, they do the research work, analyse the case and draft the legal brief for advocates, who fight the case in US courts. This saves lot of time and energy, besides money, for American attorneys. Legal jobs are billed at average US $500 an hour in US while the billing from India could be as low as US $100 an hour, which would mean revenues of $200,000 per annum per person. Presuming 100,000 legal jobs coming to India by 2015, this translates into a potential US $20bn opportunity for India by 2015. In India thus, even if one pays a good lawyer up to Rs 40,000-50,000 per month, which would translate to a mere $5 per hour cost; at a billing rate of $100 per hour, that translates into 2000% profits.

Our Say It is no doubt that a huge opportunity could potentially exist but there are several issues to tackle such as the need for India to open up its legal services and amend its Partnership Act. Nasscom, on its part, is lobbying with government to argue for reciprocal opening up of the services sector at the WTO. And though extremely unlikely, the $20 bn in legal outsourcing is not impossible, considering that this would be a mere 5% of the perhaps $400 bn US legal market by 2015.