The World Really is Flat!

I was at a seminar last month in St. Louis, MO, where I met Mark Ross, Director of Business Development for a company called "LawScribe."  His company provides legal and paralegal support to US and UK law firms using offshore labor from India. I had been reading with interest the outsourcing of much of the editorial work that West and Lexis do to offshore firms, such as digest and key-number annotations, and more recently the use of such firms to do database  entry and coding on large document cases, but this was the first time that I had even conceived  of the possibility of using such support in my small practice.  He makes a compelling case for using these services.  With current technology, the offshore service provider can access my network (or that part to which I permit access) via a VPN connection over the internet. They can print on my local machines, and communicate through IM or via email.  Employee absenteeism is not a factor, since the service provider employs a team of professionals and can quickly substitute another in order to get the work product out in a timely manner. 

Certainly these services are no substitute for high quality support  employees in a lawyer's local office.  But Mark does make a compelling case for incorporating them into your back-office production staff that cannot be simply ignored out of hand. To think that a solo-practioner in Clinton, Mississippi could even consider using such a service, which would have been unheard of even two years ago, is amazing to me.  With Skype and video phones likely to become ubiquitous over the next couple of years one can easily imagine competing legal services firms providing routine advice and routine documents to the discount-seeking public via attorneys located in India.