March 29, 2024

Florida Law

Delhi Up to the Bar

Legal work is following the cheap-labor trend to India.

Art Levy | 8/1/2007

American companies have been outsourcing manufacturing and call-center jobs abroad for decades, but certain services — wedding planning, for example, or landscape architecture — seemed immune from the outsourcing trend. The Wall Street Journal reported recently, however, that firms are finding ways to provide more personal services, from math tutoring to kitchen remodeling, from overseas. The $20-billion outsourcing industry even includes a California online newspaper that hires India-based journalists to cover government meetings in Pasadena.


Etan Mark pays seven attorneys in India $7,500 to $12,000 a year to review documents. He hopes to hire another 40 by 2008. [Photo: Daniel Portnoy]
The outsourcing trend includes legal services as well: A Miami Beach-based company is shipping some legal work typically done by paralegals or first-year associates — mainly limited to researching legal documents — to attorneys in Bangalore, India.

Florida attorney Etan Mark co-founded iDiligence this year along with Jason Jones, a lawyer based in Chicago. They charge clients, who so far include small law firms and companies involved in litigation, $30 an hour for their Indian attorneys to review documents — well below the $200 to $400 an hour a firm could bill for a first- or second-year associate to do the same work.

Two committees of the Florida Bar have taken notice of the practice and have decided, so far, that legal outsourcing is acceptable under certain conditions. Reviewing documents, for example, is fine, but the Indian lawyers — who are licensed to practice law in India but not in Florida — are not permitted to give legal advice directly to clients here, says Lori Holcomb, director of the Florida Bar’s unlicensed practice of law department.

Elizabeth Tarbert, ethics counsel for the Florida Bar’s professional ethics committee, adds the outsourcing company must closely supervise the Indian attorneys. “The main thing is making sure that you are not giving them anything that would require the independent professional judgment of a lawyer,” Tarbert says. “As far as we’re concerned, it doesn’t matter if the person in India is a lawyer or not. If they’re a lawyer in India, that’s great. But they’re not a lawyer as far as we’re concerned. They’re not members of the Florida Bar.”

Mark, a Florida Bar member, says he supervises the Indian lawyers by phone and e-mail and makes sure they follow the rules. He has seven Indian attorneys on staff now and hopes to hire 40 or more by the end of the year. He says he pays the lawyers base salaries ranging from $7,500 to $12,000 a year, depending on their experience, which he says is 30% more than they could earn otherwise as an attorney in India.

So far, Mark says, his company has gotten a mixed response at home. “On one hand, people think it fits a need to get high-quality work for a low fee,” he says. “But there is certainly a minority — and sometimes a vocal minority — that is flat-out opposed to outsourcing. I certainly have gotten into my fair share of squabbles with attorneys who feel what I’m doing is somehow hurting their bottom line, that we’re taking jobs away from Americans. But to me, there are jobs and whoever can do the job the best and the most cheaply should be the one doing the job. That’s what the free market is.”

Tags: Politics & Law, North Central, Government/Politics & Law

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