Outsourcing
E-Discovery Rule Changes Boost Legal Outsourcing to India
Posted Apr 4, 2008, 09:37 am CDT
By Debra Cassens Weiss
Changes to federal rules governing the discovery of electronic documents have boosted legal outsourcing to India.
E-discovery is producing thousands of pages of documents in lawsuits that require a careful—and potentially expensive—review, Time Magazine reports. The cost of document review by lawyers is only about $1 a page in India but as high as $7 to $10 per page in the United States, the story says.
John Blenke, the general counsel for TransUnion in Chicago, told Time that lawyers in India are currently reviewing more than a million litigation e-mails for the company at a cost of less than $10 an hour. Here he would pay $60 to $85 an hour for the service.
DuPont also outsources document review, its chief litigation counsel Thomas Sager told Time. He said the company saved $500,000 in 2006 by outsourcing legal work to a Chicago company that used lawyers in India and the Philippines to review documents.
Amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in 2006 recognized that electronic information must be treated on equal footing with paper documents, the ABA Journal reported in its February 2007 article, “E-Discovery Gets Real.”
The rule changes create an obligation for attorneys to assess how digital information is stored, how it can be produced, and what kind of electronic evidence is relevant to a case.
An ABA Journal freelance reporter visited the Mumbai offices of a law firm that performs outsourced legal work and reported on what she learned in “Manhattan Work at Mumbai Prices,” published in October 2007. The author of that piece has firsthand experience with document review. She reported on her temporary job as an “attorney at blah” in a different article for another publication.
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Comments
Posted by anonymous - 3 months, 1 day, 5 hours, 37 minutes ago
you will never get quality work from people who do not THINK in the language. I’ve done foreign language doc review in the US and trust me many of the lawyers on the foreign language projects here are not up to par in their language skills and they inevitably miss things. I have no doubt about it. Update makes us take a roughly 40 minute language test, but it is a BS formality. When reviewing technical and legal documents basic fluency is NOT enough and only native speakers can do a proper job. If you have such incompetence here on foreign language projects you can believe it is 10x worse in India.
Posted by 3L - 3 months, 5 hours, 57 minutes ago
I amused at your assumption that Indians don’t think in English. You’re obviously not aware that most professionals in India are taught in English all through their schooling and college years, and their language of preference outside of the home is English. So, for you to assume that they don’t think in English, is highly presumptious, ignorant and uneducated.
Posted by Leslie Stewart - 2 months, 3 weeks, 4 days, 18 hours, 30 minutes ago
Sure, sure they speak perfect English. Just call AOL or Dell helplines. You never know if you’ve just promised them your firstborn or agreed to loan them a million dollars. IMO, you get what you pay for.