Law.com - Eversheds Signs New Deal to Outsource Work to India

Law.com - Eversheds Signs New Deal to Outsource Work to India
There was a very interesting article in this morning's New York Times entitled "Cost-Cutting in New York, but a Boom in India" about the outsourcing of financial analysis services to India. Some of the services being outsourced are at a higher level, more comparable to what used to be performed in places like New York, London, or Hong Kong. They are not "entry level" services. It seems that some of the world's major financial institutions are outsourcing financial analysis services on an increasingly grand scale. The article quotes the number of personnel some of the major banks have involved, and the numbers are, in deed, impressive.

Then, in this morning's Law.com there was the above noted feature about Eversheds doing the same thing in the legal services area. This is another example of the mobility of legal services, particularly, legal services of a commodity nature, which is the case here - the services in question are indicated to be services that cannot be performed at a reasonable cost inhouse or at Eversheds. So long as the ethical considerations are properly observed, these services can usually be performed elsewhere, usually at substantially less cost. This leads to the obvious conclusion that it is going to become increasingly more necessary for larger law firms to be able to access these outsourcing services in an ethically appropriate way.