Will Tough Economy Push Companies to Outsource Legal Work?

Will Tough Economy Push Companies to Outsource Legal Work?
This article provides some interesting insights into the problems and benefits of legal process outsourcing, which is rapidly emerging as a means for some major US corporations to reduce their legal costs. The article draws an important distinction between business process outsourcing (back office functions, such as accounting) and the more recent phenomenon of legal process outsourcing, which essentially means turning over complete legal functions to the outsourcing firm. In some cases, companies like Microsoft and GE claim to have achieved significant savings with a superior work product. Of course, the recent ABA ethics opinion (also briefly mentioned in the article) requires a qualified attorney to accept responsibility for the outsourced work. That seems to be the major concern, as, for the time being, legal process outsourcing seems to require a considerable amount of oversight.