On the face of it, Megha Agarwal, a cheerful woman in her early twenties, would pass for just another call-centre employee in Mumbai. What sets her apart from that brood is the fact that she holds a law degree and does almost everything that a practising lawyer would — except for arguing cases. For Agarwal and many other young lawyers like her are the beneficiaries of a relatively recent and fast-growing phenomenon called legal process outsourcing.

This fledgling industry, which basically gets legal work from the US done on the cheap in India, is like oxygen for India’s large number of law graduates. Not only do LPOs offer young lawyers steady employment, they offer pay packets that are comparable with those received by B-school graduates. Before LPOs arrived, young lawyers could at best hope for a maintenance fee of Rs 2,000 or less per month if they apprenticed with a high court lawyer. But starting salaries for lawyers in LPOs can be ten times that much. Lawyers with a couple of years of experience and a strong track record can easily command annual salaries of Rs 8 lakh.

To boot, LPO jobs carry none of the uncertainty of an internship with a mainstream law firm. “I interned and worked with a Supreme Court lawyer in Delhi,” says Agarwal, who got her degree from Delhi University. “But, a law firm did not appeal to me, as I noticed that things move very slowly”. So in 2004 Agarwal made a trip down to Mumbai and joined an LPO firm. Two and a half years later, Agarwal says she feels vindicated because she is making several times more than she would have received in her old job. If she regrets losing the ‘prestige’ tag that goes with being attached to a Supreme Court lawyer, she doesn’t show it.

But it is not just money that draws people to LPOs, says Sampada Parulekar, a lawyer with an LPO in Mumbai. But the big bait drawing young lawyers to LPOs today is the chance to learn about US and international law, says Parulekar, who chose the line because her old job of writing case laws and summaries on income tax claims did not challenge her enough. “Now I have learnt to present and write better cases for US attorneys, which I could have never done with an Indian firm,” she says.

In fact Parulekar says that of her fifty batchmates, only seven ended up practising law. The rest opted to work like her in LPO firms.

The LPO firms are aware of this and using the promise of international experience to attract new talent. Most new LPO recruits are trained for a bit in US law and are taught internationally valued skills, such as doing document reviews for US clients and performing complex tasks, such as multi-jurisdictional surveys (MJS).

In doing these surveys, the lawyers’ get invaluable training when they have to scour legal databases such as Westlaw, Lexis-Nexis and Pacer to understand the case laws pertaining to different states in the US. In time, they learn to connect to clients in the US, understand their businesses and then come up with advice on the legalities that need to be considered in setting up a business in a state. Such constant skill building on the part of these employees is also what the Indian LPO businesses hope will convince clients in the West to embark on the next wave of offshoring of legal processes to India. But that battle is far from won, as quality concerns, security threats and rising costs continue to keep LPOs from meeting their full potential.