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Cottage industry: off-shore providers and intermediaries of legal services

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Much of the ruckus about off shoring legal work has died down, but there is the occasional recrudescence. Two vendors were mentioned in the Nat’l L.J., Vol. 29, Jan. 15, 2007 at 16 as part of the legal process outsourcing industry: Pangea3 LLC and Lumen Legal. Others I am aware of include Office Tiger, Atlas Legal Research and Xansa (See my posts of Nov. 14, 2005 and references cited regarding off-shore resources; and Jan. 27, 2006 and Jan. 6, 2006 and references cited.). OffShoreXPerts listed 875 cites when I searched for “Legal/Law Outsourcing” on Jan. 27, 2007.

The article makes the distinction between fungible and non-fungible categories of legal work, including in the fungible categories such tasks as “review of electronic documents, contract review, patent application drafting and even legal research and writing.” The gamut of tasks that can be done is potentially huge (See my post of Jan. 25, 2007 with a different slant on commodity legal services.), the dollars (and rupees) and stake are huger, and the potential implications of offshore legal services over time are, well, hugest.

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One response to “Cottage industry: off-shore providers and intermediaries of legal services”

  1. Tariq Hafeez says:
    January 29, 2007 at 10:45 am

    Thanks for posting again on legal offshoring and pointing out the new piece on offshoring in the National Law Journal. In our experience, while much of the media hype on legal offshoring has subsided, the industry continues to grow at a healthy pace, as some of the largest law firms and corporations have signed on as early adopters, forcing others in the market to take notice.
    In terms of commodity legal services, it is very interesting that the term is applying to a more extensive range of services. Our company, LegalEase Solutions (www.lgles.com) started in February 2005 providing almost exclusively legal research & writing to law firms and legal departments. We have gradually added document review and due diligence to our line of services. The latter services are more akin to commodity services than the former. However it’s good to know that legal research is also gaining momentum as a commodity legal service, as that is what we have done the longest.