LPO's Under Attack

Legal Process Outsourcing providers have been subjected to a two-pronged attack over the last 60 days. The attacks are taking place in the LPO's primary locations: The US and India.

In India, a group calling itself "The Association of Indian Lawyers" filed a petition in the Chennai High Court against foreign law firms doing business in India, despite a ban against them. The petition mentions top US and UK law firms, but also includes Integreon, the largest and most credible LPO provider. The inclusion of LPO's stems, according to the petitioners, from the LPO's being illegal foreign law offices.

It is to be noted that a number of top Indian law firms, most notably Kochhar & Co. and FoxMandal Little have tried to penetrate the LPO market, with little success.  This is mostly due to the passive mentality of Indian lawyers and the nature of practicing law in India which conflicts with the much more aggressive and dynamic US and UK legal systems. Clearly, the traditional Indian lawyers are feeling threatened by the new entrants, and want a "piece of the action".

Around the same time, in the US, both the ABA Commission on Ethics 20/20 and the ABA Section on International Law have requested inputs on the ethical aspects of both domestics and foreign outsourcing of legal work.

"The Commission [on Ethics 20/20] is reviewing the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct, existing ethics opinions and other literature and studies about this topic. The Commission is also interested in gathering information about domestic and international legal process outsourcing from lawyers, law firms, clients and outsourcing providers  [...]".

The ABA Section on International Law in turn held a meeting on April 17, 2010 titled Public Forum on Offshore Outsourcing of Legal Services in New York. The stated goal of the meeting is "information gatehring", but participants did put LPO representatives on the defensive.

The LPOs were represented in the various US meetings by Pangea3, UnitedLex and Quislex.

Our opinion is that the Indian front will get bogged down in the notoriously inert Indian legal system (0.8 prob ability), and will achieve little in the foreseeable future. The US action will unlikely produce any significant threats to the industry, but may introduce more specific guidelines around the ethics of Legal Outsourcing (.7 probability). Such guidelines could prove beneficial to the industry and to the globalization of the legal trade.