Latest News and Articles from BPO

News Home

American firms offshoring the lawyers BusinessWeek, October 01, 2006 Mention offshore outsourcing, and Americans fume. But who would cry if we outsourced the work of lawyers, with their fat fees and endless strategies for adding years to litigation? Sounds like a great idea, but many might say it can't be done anyway. Legal work is too sensitive and technical to risk farming out to Asia.  Try telling that to DuPont, the giant chemical company. On the seventh floor of an old office building on the outskirts of Manila, 30 Filipino attorneys, including three who have passed U.S. bar exams, are seated elbow-to-elbow with 50 other staff at long tables crammed with PCs.  Working in three shifts seven days a week, they read, analyze, and annotate digital images of memos, payroll and medical records, old engineering specs, and other documents that might be used as evidence in DuPont legal cases.  The operation is part of a tieup between DuPont and offshoring shop OfficeTiger that is testing the limits of how far legal services outsourcing can go.  Attorneys and others in OfficeTiger's Philippines and India offices are helping out on more than a dozen projects, from monitoring old contracts and licensing agreements to managing documentary evidence for product-liability cases. "We want to be the center of excellence for this whole area of offshore document management," says DuPont assistant general counsel Thomas L. Sager.  The most important project is processing 2 million pages of documents vital to a DuPont case against 10 insurers. DuPont aims to recover more than $100 million in payouts to thousands of former pipefitters, insulators, mechanics, and other workers who claimed their illnesses came from exposure to asbestos in DuPont facilities.  Much of the work is tedious: digitizing and indexing decades-old paperwork. But some requires judgment normally provided by U.S. lawyers, such as determining whether documents are relevant to a case or violate confidentiality.  By going offshore, DuPont aims to save 40% to 60% on document work and cut up to $6 million from its annual $200 million-plus in legal spending. It also hopes to shave months off the discovery process in court cases. But the move is risky.  In industries from software to customer support, corporations have run into myriad logistical and quality problems with offshore outsourcing. If OfficeTiger stumbles and doesn't have the evidence ready by December, when the asbestos case could go to trial, it could cost DuPont millions.  But if OfficeTiger delivers, it could mean big changes for the $225 billion U.S. legal services industry. DuPont's legal department has been a pioneer in cost-cutting since the early 1990s, saving more than $100 million over that time through automation, outsourcing, and reducing the number of outside law firms it uses.