Ajmani says there is still scope for Indian LPOs to grow.  First, they should forget about trying to win the real high-end work that has a significant impact on the future of the firm like, say, litigation. Instead, he says, they should focus on more routine jobs, such as the drafting of contracts, which is essentially a standardised process and relatively easy to farm out to third party service providers.

Already, the great part of legal work being outsourced to India is of this type, with patent and trademark filings constituting about 70 per cent of all LPO revenue.

Currently, only around 10 per cent of LPO work is related to litigation support, which is categorised as high-end LPO business. However, in terms of the total global legal process outsourcing market, which is pegged by the Quatrro research firm in TTTT at $20 billion (of this $6 billion are offshorable), it is precisely the latter segment where bulk of the opportunity lies.

LPO industry leaders expect major breakthroughs in the high-end segment over the next three years.

One way of LPO firms breaking the ice on high-end work could be through enlarging their presence in the US. Acknowledging the psychological benefits attached to a local presence in some legal areas, Puneet Mohey, president, Michigan-based Lexadigm, an offshore provider of legal support services, has a team of attorneys in the US and the remaining in an office in India. “That way, the client has an attorney based in the US to interface with. That greatly increases the comfort level with offshoring.” While Mohey admits that the larger law firms in the US have not yet begun offshoring (“it’s still a wait-and-watch strategy,” he says), he is confident that it will not be long before that happens as well.