Exporting Lawyers!!! Yeah!!

[kcwayne]

Lou Dobbs is running a segment about how law firms are planning to export 11% of their jobs to cheap labor countries.

They are starting to eat their own.

We can we start exporting Republicans?

[BlueJazz]

1. I think Garbage Companies have stopped accepting

..Republicans...something about toxic waste.. :)

[WhoCountsTheVotes]

2. Ha Ha Ha HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA

bwa ha ha ha ha ha ! hwah ha hee hee hee hee he heh he heh :) :) :) :) :) :) :)

[yankeeinlouisiana]

3. To do research or what?

How can lawyers in other countries help us? What am I missing?

[kcwayne]

4. Back office and research work

They will do things like patent enforcement, contract drafting, and legal research.

These are the things that alot of law grads and interns cut their teeth on. So we can look forward to even greater incompetence in the practice of the law.

[yankeeinlouisiana]

5. Thanks for the info.

Maybe now something will get done to stop all of the out sourcing.

Edit: When will the out sourcing stop? All of this has to stop and stop now! All of this is insane. We need to ask our candidates what they will do cause *'s admin. won't do it; they'll only encourage it!

[kcwayne]

6. My money says the lawyers will make it illegal to outsource legal work

and fuck the rest of you.

[dumpster_baby]

9. The article mentions patent work, but only citizens can be patent agents

I know--I am one!

[kcwayne]

10. Yeah, but there is alot of pure research work

when investigating patents, whether you are trying to file a new one, or figure out who might be violating one that you have. So you hire Dipak in Calcutta to do a research of the literature to get the scoop on what you are interested in (at $9 per day), and the litigation and filing are handled by lawyers/agents here in the US.

[dpibel]

11. Don't mean to rain on your parade

But laws and regulations can change. A mere stroke of the pen et voila! Indian patent agents.

[dpibel]

8. Almost anything

Edited to add one "s"

There's very little business law that requires physical presence. In fact, it would be unproblematic to handle litigation using offshore counsel -- a video hookup would work just fine. Even if it didn't have the imprimatur of the official legal system, parties are free to contract to any kind of dispute resolution they like.

Businesses pay a nice bit of change to their lawyers. These days, when the bottom line is everything, changing from a NYC lawyer who charges a grand an hour to one in Bangalore, who speaks perfect English and has an equivalent education, but charges $50 is gonna be real tempting for the cut-to-the bone CEOs.

Just so no one will miss my deathless insights, here's a rerun of what I said on the thread that this is a dupe of:

The elite servant class -- lawyers, who make comfortable money serving the interests of the rich, for instance -- have not cared about jobs going overseas so long as they were the jobs of insignificant proles.

When outsourcing/globalization starts to threaten their jobs, that's a completely different matter. And these are people accustomed to wielding a secondary level of power. They're also far more politically savvy than your average outsourced textile worker.

Thing are likely to heat up a bit with white-collar outsourcing.

Not to hijack your thread, but a word to the lawyer bashers: Those evil, ambulance-chasing plaintiff's attorneys that you love to hate are a tiny minority. The overwhelming majority of attorneys (and of rich attorneys) are the ones who spend their lives figuring out how to help one business stick it to another business. They're the ones with the real political power, because they have corporate money behind them.

[Cleita]

7. Exporting conservatives of all stripes. That would be great.

eom