Adecade after legal work began to be outsourced to India, the industry has grown to reach an annual turnover of $60 million(Rs 246 crore). But despite the hype over how legal outsourcing and other such value-added services would alter the global economy by moving high value, white collar jobs out of western economies and into India, the fact is that this is not happening.

While the growth in the volume of legal work handled out of India by third-party legal process outsourcing (LPO) companies and subsidiaries of law firms based in the US is estimated to touch 7 per cent a year by 2010, according to the BPO Council of the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry (Assocham), most of the business still focuses on lower-end drafting and documentation work. Significantly, most of this work does not come from Ivy League US law firms but from American corporations looking to reduce internal legal costs.

The reasons are not hard to see.  For one, regulations governing the US legal system require that any legal work done by a person who is not a member of an American bar must be supervised and vouched for by someone who is a member.  While it is easy enough for a third party to monitor routine paperwork, since law is largely interpretative it is much more difficult to vouchsafe more subjective work that requires expert knowledge and training.