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forth. Both large and small enterprises can purchase professional services in these support functions off-the-shelf in global markets. 2 This involves the application of a global delivery model, perfected by Indian software firms for IT services, to knowledge-intensive professional services.
This all seems sensible, but will the offshore outsourcing of legal services succeed? There are major challenges to managing and capturing profit in this global value chain, including the decomposition, iteration, and disaggregation of work processes.
A prerequisite for offshore outsourcing is the breaking up of the value chain into a sequence of tasks, each with clearly defined interfaces. This poses a challenge because lawyers generally believe that decomposition in this manner may not work well. Traditionally, a client entrusted a particular lawyer to carry out an integrated service, with assistance from junior associates, paralegals, and legal secretaries. The integrated service, typically delivered in a ‘job shop’ craft mode, consists of at least three separable steps: knowledge and information management; consultative advice and representation; and client relationship management. For example, in litigation, document discovery ( increasingly dominated by e-discovery) and legal research are part of the first step, which becomes a basis for advising and representing clients in court. Similarly, in intellectual property (IP) work, prior art search and IP portfolio analysis are part of the first step, while commercialization studies of unused patents are aspects of the second step of giving insight and advice.
In the last two decades, information and communication technology (ICT) has enabled the separation of knowledge management from advisory work. ICT has been used primarily to automate processes in data management, for example by developing document assembly software for contract drafting. Legal service, just as manufacturing, is subjected to process thinking to standardize, systematize, and package the law. Thus, the use of technology is a first step toward making legal work more repeat-
able, scalable, and offshoreable. For example, it is expected that document discovery (including e-discovery) will involve breaking a project into clearly defined components that can be worked on by separate teams in parallel. Distance should not matter in managing and coordinating these geographically dispersed teams.
In reality, there are some legal tasks, such as conveyancing, which can be easily packaged and transferred to an offshore destination. But there remain other tasks that are part of, and cannot be completely separated from, the whole. Legal research provides a good example. At one end of the spectrum, a 50-state survey on a particular issue is easily outsourceable as a standalone project. At the other end of the spectrum lies case law research that depends on knowledge of precedents and case interpretation as well as an understanding of the whole case for which research is undertaken.
Another example is document discovery in litigation support. Objective coding, involving entering the time and addressee of each email message, for example, is completely modulariz-able. By contrast, subjective coding, involving the identification of relevant and privileged information, cannot be done without the full knowledge of the case.
Thus, the reductionist strategy to decompose legal support work into modular parts may be difficult to implement in practice. If this sort of decomposition is easier said than done in software development, many lawyers believe, rightly or wrongly, that such things are virtually impossible for legal work. Thus, although few would doubt that some simple legal support work may be subjected to such decomposition, how much of core legal services can (and should) be decomposed in this manner remains an open question.
Legal work is not performed entirely offshore, but instead the work moves back and forth between the client’s home base in the U.S. or Europe and the offshore outsourcing site in India or the Philippines. This onshore/ offshore mix arises out of necessity in the nature of legal work. For example, in drafting contracts, an offshore LPO
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