Models for Offshore Legal Outsourcing

According to a November 1, 2004 article in The American Lawyer, there are a few different emerging models for offshore outsorcing of legal services. Vendors like Lexadigm Solutions and Lawwave.com rely exclusively on Indian lawyers to conduct low-level legal work and analysis. Others, like OfficeTiger, use a mix of lawyers and trained professionals to handle legal and nonlegal tasks such as managing conflicts databases and document management and review. A few vendors specialize. Intellevate has hired an Indian staff of lawyers and Ph.D.s to conduct patent research and other IP work. The company has a dedicated team devoted just to Microsoft's patent work.

"A large company will send us an invention description," says Intellevate chief executive Leon Steinberg, who oversees 72 Indian employees and offices in Bangalore and Noida, a suburb of New Delhi. "We would have a computer science expert, or some other kind of trained specialist, do research and determine whether the invention can be patented. They use proprietary databases and online tools to conduct research. Then they post their search result on a Web site that only our client can access."