Legal Outsourcing (Ribstein) Forum

[miamiman]

What do you guys make of this article, ran today, on outsourcing. Ribstein (UIUC) suggests this is sea change material.

http://www.forbes.com/2010/08/05/lawyer ... stein.html

[General Tso]

NYT or WSJ (cant remember) had a lengthy article about legal outsourcing today as well

[miamiman]

NYT or WSJ (cant remember) had a lengthy article about legal outsourcing today as well

Sea change?

[General Tso]

NYT or WSJ (cant remember) had a lengthy article about legal outsourcing today as well

Sea change?

it's a sea change for the economy at large. medical outsourcing is not far away. America is returning to the robber baron age...soon there will be the richest 2%, and then the rest of us.

[MJMD]

Law's status as an inherently statist and national institution makes the "legal industry" more "protectionist" than just about any other. U.S. law firms cannot outsource all of their work to India: I wouldn't even imagine that they could outsource most of their work to India. There are too many stages at which a license to practice law in the United States is simply a necessity.

No doubt this trend will continue to a certain extent, resulting in (proportionately) fewer jobs for U.S. lawyers: but I actually suspect that wages for professionals in India are likely to rise much faster than jobs can be exported there from the U.S. The "legal industry" in the United States is unlikely to be hollowed out and destroyed the way that actual industrial industries were; there simply isn't enough time left on the scale of global development for that to happen.

[yellowjacket2012]

Law's status as an inherently statist and national institution makes the "legal industry" more "protectionist" than just about any other. U.S. law firms cannot outsource all of their work to India: I wouldn't even imagine that they could outsource most of their work to India. There are too many stages at which a license to practice law in the United States is simply a necessity.

No doubt this trend will continue to a certain extent, resulting in (proportionately) fewer jobs for U.S. lawyers: but I actually suspect that wages for professionals in India are likely to rise much faster than jobs can be exported there from the U.S. The "legal industry" in the United States is unlikely to be hollowed out and destroyed the way that actual industrial industries were; there simply isn't enough time left on the scale of global development for that to happen.

What facts are you basing these assertions on? Especially your very last claim about the time left on the scale of "global development"? I think I get the general point you would be trying to make if you had supported these assertions with some facts, but without them, I'm not sure why the exact opposite position of every single sentence you stated would make any less sense.

I'm really not attacking your logic, I couldn't care less - I don't know you - I am genuinely interested in this subject, and I'd love to know why you've stated the positions you've stated. I have family in India, and this is an area I could potentially see myself doing some work in, so I'm down for learning any factually supported positions on this issue.

I've heard a bunch of baloney from people with limited insight 7 years ago in the legal industry on the topic of legal outsourcing, and here we are in 2010 and I am a little sorry I shied away from this whole field because of their general pessimism about it. If anything, outsourcing in an overpaid profession with zero overhead is a mighty big risk - barring protectionist barriers like the licensing (bar), and statutory stuff (tech transfer concerns, etc.)

[dougroberts]

NYT Article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/05/busin ... f=business

[StrictlyLiable]

Scary.

[yellowjacket2012]

Its definitely scary on many levels, but its just the parallel deal with the housing market - you buy a house which ends up happening to have been in an overheated market, it tanks, you lose your investment - same with the value of a JD - you pay 200k for this stack of cards, plus the lost income, so you basically pay like, 300-600k depending on how much you would've made instead of high school, and you hope you recover it back.

Some people don't view an education as an investment in a financial sense, and upgrade it to some moral highground - but some people also feel that way about "homes" where they live in - in the end, both are investments, even if the buyer doesn't regard it as an investment.

I went to a presentation by an economist at Northwestern about the big law structure, don't know what the process was, but his conclusion was that the big law structure is unsustainable - will look for link

[bwv812]

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