provider may create a first draft based on a template, followed by contract negotiations by the client law firm, which results in requests for adding and modifying clauses. There may be several iterations of onshore negotiations and offshore contract modifications before the final contract is produced.
Similarly in litigation support, an LPO provider may undertake document discovery for a client law firm in New York. Here, the iterative back-and-forth between the client and the LPO provider occurs due to the client’s quality check on the provider’s work and court-imposed deadlines for submitting specific types of documents.
Distance involved in offshore outsourcing poses a challenge to this iterative nature of work as it requires smooth handoffs and handbacks. The traditional model of doing legal work, in which an associate may walk over to instruct contract lawyers and paralegals face-to-face, is not amenable to thinking about managing the handoffs and handbacks in a systematic manner.
It was the rapid rise in legal fees that caused law firms to use more contract lawyers within the U.S. borders. But these contract lawyers, hired through staffing agencies, come and go. Some leading India-based LPO providers think that with more stable employment in India, it is easier to set up robust processes offshore than onshore, using tighter project management with milestones. Thus, ironically, U.S. law firms may hire contract lawyers located nearby on a short-term basis, while they attempt to establish longer-term stable relationships with legal professionals at a distance. It may well be that necessity is the mother of invention, and that distance is forcing LPO providers to take process control, project management, and data security more seriously. But it is not yet clear how much of legal work can be easily shifted from a traditional model to this model of process-based iteration without undermining quality.
Work Disaggregation Offshore outsourcing will affect the way we think about professional work and the nature of professionalism itself. The shift from highly qualified to less qualified occupational skills has been
well under way in legal, medical, and other professional fields for reasons that have nothing to do with offshore outsourcing. However, ICT facilitates disaggregating a particular piece of work into finer standardized process steps. And the more process steps are disaggregated, the more it becomes possible to enable a non-lawyer to do legal support work. Thus, lawyers’ work has become more fragmented in the same way that craftsmen were deskilled by Frederick Taylor’s scientific management theory a century ago. Moreover, ICT technology further undermines the advisory function of the legal profession, as more clients rely on self-service in consuming legal services. 3 Ultimately, it is the changing nature of professions onshore that enables the offshore outsourcing of professional services.
At the same time, there is an inherent pull toward keeping the profession whole, which mitigates against the de-professionalization of lawyers. In particular, some believe that even the most segmentable low-end legal work will suffer from poor quality without proper legal training. Thus, some patent attorneys may claim the knowledge of how to prosecute a patent is essential to do the most elementary aspects of patent search and drafting.
Moreover, the legal profession is self-regulated with nationally based jurisdiction. Thus, lawyers may be deemed to be less offshorable than paralegals, who in turn are less offshorable than other legal support workers precisely because the two defining characteristics of jobs that cannot be offshored apply to the legal profession. 1 So, not only does legal work require face-to-face
personal communications and/or contact with end users of the service; specific legal work must be also performed at a U.S. work location rather than overseas. Given current regulation, Indian lawyers are not permitted to practice law in the U.S. or England, while U.S. or English lawyers are not permitted to practice law in India. India-based LPO providers therefore merely supply legal support work, but never practice law in their clients’ jurisdiction.
Thus, the global delivery of legal services is likely to further blur the boundary between what is done by a qualified professional and what can be done by non-qualified personnel with supervision from a qualified professional. But exactly how offshore outsourcing will affect the nature of professions is uncertain because of multiple forces at play.
There are several reasons why the offshore outsourcing of professional services is occurring. But there are some unknowns, especially in relation to the nature of professions that will affect the future of this phenomenon. The factors motivating offshore outsourcing are strong, and the pressures to offshore will remain. But the experience with the offshore outsourcing of software development sheds some light on just how difficult it is to deal with issues of work decomposition and iteration. The trajectory of global delivery of software work does not initially appear to translate well into that of professional services due to an additional factor of uncertainty in the nature of self-regulation of professions and the boundary of professional work. Thus, it is not advisable to draw too many conclusions about the future of the professional service offshoring from the experience thus far with software offshore outsourcing.
References
1. Blinder, A. S. how Many U.S. Jobs Might Be Offshorable? CEPS Working Paper No. 142, 2007.
2. Palmisano, S. The globally integrated enterprise. Foreign Affairs (May/June 2006).
3. Susskind, R. The End of Lawyers? Oxford University Press, 2008.
Mari Sako ( mari.sako@sbs.ox.ac.uk) is a professor of Management Studies in Said Business School at the University of Oxford, U.k.
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