When Rocky Dahir, chief executive of Atlas Legal Research, pitched one of his first clients on his company's legal outsourcing service, the disheartening response showed little awareness of India's startling progress in the services industries. "'My god,' the client said. 'When I think of India, I have an image in my head of little children sewing soccer balls, not lawyers writing legal briefs,' " he recalls. Fortunately for Mr Dahir, the client agreed to use Atlas's services.
The trend towards offshore outsourcing, well under way in the IT services and finance sectors, is now beginning to make its presence felt in the legal industry. The work being moved abroad includes not just basic administrative tasks but also more sophisticated and complex jobs traditionally carried out by trained lawyers in the country where the work originated. According to a study by Forrester, the research firm, almost 40,350 lawyer jobs in the US will be outsourced by 2015, amounting to nearly 8 per cent of the total employed in the field.
