A Texas lawyer who runs a business saved 90% of legal fees by sending legal research offshore. 

A Smaller Legal World in the Fulton County Daily Reporter (12/13/05) reports that a lawyer running a telemedicine company paid local Texas counsel $250,000 for multi-state research. Subsequently, he turned to a legal research company in India and saved 90%.

The article also reports that Forrester Research found that 12,000 legal jobs moved offshore last year. excited utterances and I maintain list of legal outsourcing companies. It is not comprehensive (for example, we do not include digital dictation), but I still have a hard time understanding where the 12,000 jobs are. I suspect that litigation support coding is one of the highest volume offshore activities; but coding jobs moved offshore years ago and it’s not clear the numbers have grown much recently. I am curious how Forrester came up with this number. The rest of the article has a balanced discussion of the potential ethical risks of sending legal work offshore.

It will be interesting to watch the market evolve. If more firms and clients gain comfort in offshoring aspects of legal work, that might open the door wider to outsourcing law firm and law department technology services as well.