The opening of a legal firm by a Nigerian in Delhi has not only lawyers up in arms against the unauthorized practice but has also revived the decade-and-a-half-old debate over the more important question – should foreign lawyers be allowed entry into India?
It is an obvious fact that businesses can only look at modifying two revenue streams, income and expenses, in order to increase profitability. If income is down and not expected to increase markedly in the near term, clients of law firms will take the hatchet to expenses in order to survive.
Recent times have seen increased competition, & changes in underlying market structure. There has been a continuing trend of decline of “relationship lawyering”. Traditionally strong relationships between law firms and corporates are eroding, with more companies opting for in-house legal departments, or “shopping around” for the best deal.
Your competitors in law firm Internet marketing are those people who are trying to rank high at the search engines for the same keywords as you are trying to rank high on. If your down the street lawyer competitor knows nothing about keyword research and how to build a law firm Internet marketing system then he will not be much of a competitor for you on the Internet.
Therefore when considering outsourcing your legal business administrative functions your first preference should be LPO India, which is an emerging country in KPO and legal outsourcing services. There are several legal process outsourcing firms in India which can make it tough for you to choose the best service provider.
Of course it makes sense that a legal secretary would type your documents and that a searcher would do legal research, this is effective and appropriate delegation. However, do you want to pay an inexperienced associate 20 hours of billable time, albeit at lower rates when an experienced attorney could have handled it in 10?
Some of the most prestigious SEO firms are nothing more than housewives, or young techies led by a management team of clever Internet marketing whiz kids. They demand the fees because they keep clients happy, by ensuring that their PPC programs are well-optimized and their favorite keywords rank organically, at or near the top of Google’s search results.
We conduct research on industry standard private databases as well as public domain databases to provide research support to your team of lawyers to win/defend litigation or to provide counsel to clients on complex issues.
As far as competence is considered, Indian lawyers work out cheaper for a foreign firm to get it done by a firm in India compare to a US law firm. The Services Export Promotion Council, set up by the Union Ministry of Commerce, is also looking into various issues related to LPOs.
There is a strong political opposition in the US against outsourcing as it may affect the livelihood of US attorneys and may also serve as a roadblock. Despite of that feeling, legal firms are more than willing to outsource their jobs to India.

Tags: Firms, India

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 8th, 2010 at 1:49 pm and is filed under Legal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.