News
Contract Attorneys Couldn't Make It As Real Attorneys?
San Francisco, CA — January 30, 2008
David Perla, co-founder of Pangea3, a company that provides legal outsourcing through offices in India, was recently quoted in the New York Law Journal as saying that only U.S. lawyers "who couldn't make it as real lawyers" work for staffing agencies. He goes on to describe how Indian attorneys are not only less expensive than those in the US, but also better.
As the head of a company that provides a variety of legal services, including staffing, I can't help but take exception to Mr. Perla's comment. At any given time, we have graduates of top law schools (including Harvard, Stanford, University of Pennsylvania - Mr. Perla's Alma Mater, University of Michigan, University of Chicago, Columbia, NYU and Boalt), many with experience as associates and in some cases partners at major firms, working on large scale review projects.
They are "real" attorneys and the work they are doing is what "real" attorneys do, not something relegated to those who are otherwise unemployable in the legal market. They are bar admitted and are making decisions based on relevancy and privilege, just like the associates or partners at the firms who either work alongside them or choose to do the work themselves. Many know how to organize projects so that review productivity is optimized and they have significant expertise in the technology used in the course of their work. Without the skills and legal experience they bring to the job, the projects they are working on would suffer immeasurably. So to say, as Mr. Perla did in the article, that contract attorneys have 'minimal skills and zero motivation' is a gross mischaracterization.
And what about Indian attorneys being better than those available in the US through staffing agencies? It is, of course, impossible for such a generalization to have any meaning since among any category of professionals, regardless of their training or geographic location, the quality of their work will vary. The one generalization that can be made based on my years of practice, is that there is no one predictor of what makes an attorney great — not the school they attended, their grades, or the job they got out of law school.
The companies that will be most successful in obtaining a high quality work product and optimizing legal spend will be those that utilize a wide range of resources, including onshore and/or offshore reviewers, to meet project requirements. Clearly, there are talented attorneys in India providing outsourced services, just as there are talented reviewers in the U.S. Fortunately for U.S. based clients, the choice isn't an either/or decision, it's finding the best model based on their business and legal needs.