The Economist & Excited Utterances
A December 14 article in The Economist recently talked about the next stage of the India outsourcing boom and how the legal services industry is an untapped market.
The short article takes the reader through a quick analysis of the first two stages of the "great Indian services-export boom" and indicates that India is entering the third stage of offering a wider spectrum of increasingly sophisticated business process outsourcing activities.
Legal outsourcing is part of this third stage and The Economist reports:
The law, in fact, illustrates how vast is the untapped potential market. About $250 billion is spent on legal services world-wide, about two-thirds of it in America, and as yet only a tiny proportion goes offshore. Forrester, a research outfit, has estimated that, by last year, 12,000 legal jobs had moved offshore, and forecast that this will increase to 35,000 by 2010. India, with its English-language skills and common-law tradition is well-placed to secure a big share of the business..
In addition, Joy London, in her December 18th blog entry, provides an excellent analysis of a recently released report by Value Notes entitled Offshoring Legal Services to India.
In the coming weeks, I will post my analysis of the report based upon my experience interfacing with a wide variety of the companies listed in the report.