What KM and Legal Outsourcing Have in Common

My loyal correspondent Rob Hyndman pointed out a feature article in Legal Affairs, "Are Your Lawyers in New York or New Delhi?," which takes on the pregnant issue of outsourcing with, to my mind (and Rob's), fairly underwhelming levels of insight.  In fact, if you only read one of the two cited pieces, read Rob's.  Aside from some truly bone-headed mis-statements in the Legal Affairs piece ("The market for outsourced legal work is expected to reach $163 billion by next year...," for example, which is a figure higher than the total revenue of all U.S. law firms last time we looked), it amounts to a compendium of anecdotes, vignettes, and conspicuously self-serving quotes from vendors side-by-side with double-talk from presumed, or should we say accused, outsourcing clients, such as this blather from Microsoft: "[as] a global company, we are constantly working to improve our ability to serve our customers worldwide in the most cost effective, efficient manner."  I mean, who writes this stuff?  Are they on drugs?

Be that as it may, outsourcing is a live issue, and its prominence and impact will only grow, not diminish. 

So, what is to be done?  As Adam Smith himself would acknowledge, and David Ricardo would surely confirm, there's no going back.  Indian lawyers (not to pick on them, but that seems to be where the action is today)  are demonstrably talented, native-language English speakers with a common law tradition, can still afford three servants on their seemingly rock-bottom salaries, and conveniently work while we sleep.  Worse—if you want to look at things that way—is that technology not only enables the instantaneous communication that can make them as much a member of the team as your office-mate, but technology facilitates the redistribution and re-use of templates, model documents, work-flow processes, and so forth.   Once your firm's intellectual know-how is up for grabs, you can't put the genie back in the bottle, can you?

Not so fast; let's not panic.  Start by reversing your perspective and looking at all these developments from the client's viewpoint.  Taking a first-stab draft of a commodity document in India?  How, precisely, is that so different from doing the same with a first-year associate?  Automating (so much as possible) other commodity transactions (patent applications) or sub-pieces of litigation (interrogatories in a sexual harassment case)—this is neither a threat to your associates' professional development nor a threat to your revenues and gross margins. 

The larger point is that "India" represents, at a conceptual level, the equivalent of a basic knowledge management system.  What is KM, after all, but an attempt to make basic document generation more productive and efficient?  Nothing is wrong with that, and by extension nothing is wrong with taking advantage of what India can provide for the basic garden-variety items (which are intellectually uninteresting anyway, by definition).   This reminds me of politicans grandstanding about the loss of garment factories to Mexico or China:   Is your dream for your kids that they can grow up and go to work in a textile mill?

Let's not forget, people, that the law can and should be a noble profession—call me old-fashioned, I still believe that.   Judgment, reserve, foresight, clarity, wisdom:  Don't you aspire to these, for your own sake and your clients?   They can never be bottled, and they can never be outsourced.