Globalization of Legal Services Models

One of my business partners,  Matthew Sullivan, has just published an article on the trend of globalizing legal services, both through legal process outsourcing (LPO) and shared service centers.   The article appears on Phil Fersht’s Horses for Sources blog, one of the leading blogs about the outsourcing industry and business globalization in general.

In the article, Matt argues that the growth in the globalization of legal services and the LPO industry is likely to continue and pick up steam in 2009 (and beyond).  The primary driver is reducing the cost of legal services, particularly as the volume of e-discovery work increases dramatically.   In addition, several barriers to outsourcing legal services work have come down: recent legal decisions have allowed legal services outsourcing (with some conditions), a number of solid pure-play legal services and diversified outsourcing service providers have emerged, and both clients and vendors are able to leverage broad knowledge about how to effectively manage US-India business processes to the legal services arena.

Matt has a unique perspective on this: he’s a US-trained attorney who worked for an IT outsourcing firm in India for two years.  There are already a couple of comments and questions on the post, and I’m sure he’d welcome more.