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Legal Services: Does More Trade Rhyme with Better Justice 79
electronic discovery, document preparation, and negotiation. Legal process outsourcing,
that is, the crossborder supply of fragments of the legal service value
chain, is currently still a relatively small business. The outsourcing and offshoring
of legal services started with standardized administrative tasks, such as document
editing and proofreading. Over time, they have moved toward more skill-intensive
work, such as litigation research and intellectual property cases involving patent
research and analysis and the drafting of patent applications. Analysts expect this
trend to continue and legal process outsourcing to become a significant export
industry in coming years. Low-income countries that can offer a combination
of reliable information and communication technology infrastructure and
language-proficient human capital with the required legal expertise will have the
occasion to tap into these business opportunities.
Forrester Research forecasts that the market for outsourced legal services in
India will expand from US$80 million in 2005 to US$4 billion in 2015 (Jaksic
2007). However, the export growth of legal services is not limited to the outsourcing
powerhouse, India. Countries as diverse as Argentina, Brazil, Panama, and the
Russian Federation have seen dynamic growth in legal service exports in the
recent past (figure 3.1). Moreover, U.K. law firms are, for example, outsourcing
patent prosecution work to lawyers in South Africa, where the legal education is
rigorous, but wage costs are comparatively low (Wesemann 2007).
Figure 3.1. Exports of Legal Services from Selected Countries, 2001–07
log (exports, legal services, US$ millions)
10,000
1,000
100
10
1
0
2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007
Armenia Brazil India Kazakhstan
Pakistan Panama Russian Federation Argentina
Source: International Monetary Fund balance of payments statistics, http://www.imf.org/
external/np/sta/bop/bop.htm.