Legal work being sent to India

WASHINGTON, May 10 (UPI) -- The latest U.S. business to experience an outsourcing boom in India is legal research, a research firm's study indicates.

Indian law school graduates, available for a fraction of their U.S. counterparts, do much of the grunt work for U.S. law firms, The Washington Post reports. They write patents, do legal research and provide support for litigators.

The legal outsourcing industry in India has grown at about a 60 percent clip each of the past three years, the Post reports. The research firm ValueNotes says the industry will provide jobs for about 24,000 people with revenue of $640 million by 2010.

India has many advantages in addition to low pay. Its law schools graduate about 300,000 people a year, its law is based, like U.S. law, on English common law and its law graduates are fluent in English.

Aashish Sharma, a recent law graduate, works for Quatrro, a legal outsourcing firm.

"It is much better than going to court in India and dealing with all kinds of rough people. Working in legal outsourcing is a happy career move for me, although my father does not fully understand what I am doing here after my education in Indian law," Sharma told the Post. "I am getting valuable exposure to the American judicial system, corporate law and their way of working."

Copyright 2008 by United Press International