Successful offshoring in the legal services space began as early as 1995, pioneered by American law firm Bickel and Brewer. Around 2001, GE began offshoring legal sevices to its captive center and has been accruing huge savings since then. These early initiatives have today mushroomed to an industry with over 50 service providers, which fall into the following categories:

• Law Firm Captives: dedicated centers of international law firms like Lexadigm, Intellevate and NewGalexy.
• Corporate Captives: In-house legal departments of companies like GE, Cisco, Oracle, Dupont.
• Third party "niche" vendors: focus on providing only legal services, such as IP PRO, Patent Metrix, Pangea3, Mindcrest and Quislex.
• Third party Multiservice BPOs: offer offshore legal services along with other services, and include the likes of Evalueserve, Datamatics, WNS and Manthan.

Apart from the lure of huge cost savings, the Indian legal offshoring growth is being driven primarily by the availability of law graduates in a country where the legal system is similar to those in major English speaking countries like the US and UK.

ValueNotes estimates the current employment in the Indian legal services offshoring segment at around 1,800, but expects this to grow to 24,000 by 2010.

According to Tejal Padwale, analyst at ValueNotes, "Despite the high growth projections, small vendors with undifferentiated low-priced offerings will be threatened by the entry of the large BPOs."

Adds Arun Jethmalani, CEO of ValueNotes, "Much of the high-end, high-priced work will flow to captives rather than third-party vendors, due to reasons of confidentiality and security. We expect captives to grow much faster than third-party vendors over the next few years."

The report "Offshoring Legal services to India" from ValueNotes provides an overview of legal services offshoring and an indepth analysis of the Indian vendor scenario along with profiles of major industry players. The report is designed to help:

• Law Firms, Corporations, Lawyers, Legal publishers looking to outsource/offshore
• Outsourcing consultants evaluate and compare the offerings of vendors
• Offshored Legal service providers to assess their competitive environment
• American and European corporations/lawfirms looking for Indian partners
• Venture Capital companies looking for investment opportunities
• Researchers looking for detailed information on legal services outsourcing

Law Firms will find this report invaluable in understanding the capabilities of vendors, and selecting the best fit.

The above report is based on secondary data as well as extensive interviews with key people at various legal services outsourcing companies in India.