As competition hots up in the marketplace, the legal industry across the globe is gradually turning towards outsourcing for gaining efficiencies and staying profitable. Recognition of the fact that legal companies need to focus on there core competencies and leave back office process, like legal research, assistance in drafting of legal memos and briefs, discovery work, assembling facts in support of litigation, claims, and patent, trademark & ERISA work, etc. to the hands of competent outsourcers is creating a compelling case for giving out non-core processes.

There are an increasing number of back-office services that are being handled in India including credit checks, debt collection, research, software development, IT support, accounting support, and medical records, just to name a few. The number of U.S. companies sending work to India is far greater than is generally known. Though the outsourcing services to the legal profession is just beginning, it is growing very fast. The reason this industry is able to prosper and grow in India at such a pace is that many qualified Indian citizens are receiving high quality educations.

Even the legal profession cannot ignore the outsourcing phenomenon for long, and India has an incredible pool of highly educated young people including many lawyers. So Legal research and other back-office work carried out at law firms may be among the next set of white-collar jobs to move offshore in big numbers. According to a recent study by researchers at the University of California at Berkeley, legal assistants and paralegals working in India on behalf of U.S. law firms earn, on average, between $8 and $12 per hour. Fees are quoted on a per unit time variable (per seat, per hour), gain share or lump sum. They are also based on turnaround time. That's about one-third of what their counterparts in the United States are paid. It is easy for Indian-based researchers to access U.S. case law, because most of that now sits in digital databases as opposed to musty old law libraries. So currently there is a noticeable trend among US, British and other foreign legal departments of businesses and law firms to send their legal work to lawyers in India.

There are no official figures to substantiate any claim as to how much legal business in terms of dollars is being sent into India. There are no surveys or government records that give this break up today. Any body’s say is any body’s guess. The outsourced work is not only legal; nor is it only secretarial. it is an ideal mix of the two. The range of legal work outsourced to India includes indexing and scanning documents, word processing, legal transcription, coding, converting physical data into electronic form, digital dictation, to reviewing transactional and litigation documents, drafting contracts, research memoranda and due diligence reports, prosecuting patents, surveying laws of various jurisdictions, interpreting and classifying US court decisions, even writing "head notes", creating databases of legal records, indexing and updating them, and all the other hardcore legal work of making interrogatories to drafting motions.