Legal Blog Watch

India's Biggest Law Firm?
This is a very interesting blog post that gives a good overview of the status of India's legal outsourcing industry, which the article states is being increasingly used by both law firms and large corporate clients alike. When I was in India recently, I had the opportunity to meet briefly with a co-owner of a legal outsourcing firm. He was a bright, aggressive young Indian lawyer who was also admitted in New York. He unabashedly claimed that Indian lawyers were the best common law lawyers in the world. Curiously, most of his staff were not Indian lawyers, which is what this article seems to confirm as well. Earlier this year, when I spoke at the Presidential Summit on the globalization of legal services at the New York State Bar Association Annual Meeting, one of my co-panelists, St. John's Law School Dean Mary Daly, suggested that legal outsourcing needed to be seriously considered. However, she also said it would be necessary to vet the outsourcing firm very carefully, including, possibly actually visiting the firm before using it, which is something the author of the above blog post apparently did as well. Legal outsourcing is an area that bears much closer scrutiny. Also, it would be wise to try to collect and share experiences users have had, especially information about the ethical issues involved and how they were resolved.