Legal Outsourcing Rates at $28/hour

"Offshoring Legal Services to India" from ValueNotes ($395) provides an overview of legal services offshoring and an analysis of the Indian vendor scenario along with profiles of major industry players. According to the press release for the December 2005 study, legal services offshoring from Indiaemploy 1800 people, generate $61 million in revenues, and are expected to grow nearly 10 times to reach $605 million by 2010. They report on 50 service providers in the industry (linked here via Excited Utterances) which fall into the following categories:

• Law Firm Captives: dedicated centers of international law firms like Lexadigm, Intellevate and NewGalexy.
• Corporate Captives: In-house legal departments of companies like GE, Cisco, Oracle, Dupont.
• Third party "niche" vendors: focus on providing only legal services, such as IP PRO, Patent Metrix, Pangea3, Mindcrest and Quislex.
• Third party Multiservice BPOs: offer offshore legal services along with other services, and include the likes of Evalueserve, Datamatics, WNS and Manthan.

Rees Morrison figures in his Law Department Management blog that "If that figure of $34,000 per professional holds ($61MM divided by 1,800) and if they billed an average of only 1,200 hours a year, that would be about $28 per hour."