Globalising Commodification: Outsourcing Legal Work to India

The outsourcing of legal work from geographic areas where it is costly to perform, such as the United States or Europe, to geographic areas such as India where it can be performed at a significantly decreased cost, has been made possible by the disaggregation of the legal processes into discrete units. Anecdotal evidence suggests a variety of benefits such as financial gains, opportunities to perform “global” work in a corporate atmosphere, interaction with foreign law firms and clients and acquisition of important skills and training enhancing the prestige of the host country lawyers. In addition, Indian legal process outsourcing (LPO) firms are viewed as important catalysts in the transformation of the country’s legal profession, offering the possibility of destabilizing the long-standing and highly stratified professional hierarchies based on social identities and social networks that typify the legal sector. Our study concludes that given that even well trained lawyers had little chance of succeeding at the bar without the help of a practising fellow professional family member or relative, the corporate culture pursued through the espousal of Western industrialism privileging rationality, objectivity, transparency, performance, merit, equality and inclusivity in LPO firms seemed to be an attractive proposition for lawyers from non-elite backgrounds. However, the simplified, standardized and routinized nature of offshored work led to the deprofessionalization of lawyers, reducing them to ‘glorified clerks’ engaged only a narrow set of their legal skills. In fact, since outsourcing lawyers did not interact with clients and colleagues abroad, they could not gradually build up their expertise to gain legal insights rendering them untouchable even in the Indian legal labour market. Implications of this were that LPO firms only provided parallel avenues for career mobility but did not destabilize the local legal market which at its core remains socially networked.