Connecticut State Legislature LPO Bill Lacks “Quality Oversight”

January 28, 2011

Recent U.S. law graduates should take note of the anti-outsourcing legislation filed by Connecticut State Representative Pat Dillon. According to Rep. Dillon, she intends to keep “legal doc review” from being offshored to overseas workers where “legal work is being done abroad with no quality oversight.” Never mind that legal process offshoring firms, like Pangea3, have the resources and expertise to handle enormous document review requests more effectively and efficiently than a handful of first-year associates crowded around a conference table in New York or Los Angeles.

As legal blogger Lisa Solomon discusses in her blog post Why Connecticut Shouldn’t Ban Legal Process Offshoring: “this sloppily drafted bill (“legal document review” is a completely different animal than drafting legal documents or conducting legal research, which are also encompassed by the bill’s language) ignores the substantial body of principled analysis of the issues surrounding legal outsourcing in favor of facile protectionism that won’t cure the legal profession’s real ills.” Solomon continues “the vast majority of U.S. legal jobs that have disappeared in the last few years were lost due to the poor economy, not because the firms that aren’t hiring (or that eliminated positions) sent legal work offshore. Protectionism won’t bring those jobs back…” Moreover, as Solomon notes, Rep. Dillon ignores the fact that the hiring attorney in the U.S. is ultimately responsible for “quality oversight.”

Fortunately for those law grads and the legal process outsourcing industry, anti-outsourcing legislation makes for better press releases than politics. Similar legislation was debated by the Connecticut House of Representatives in 2003 but died in the Senate Judiciary Committee. In 2007, the National Foundation for American Policy released a report finding a reduction in state legislation to restrict global sourcing from a peak in 2004. Last September, the “Creating American Jobs and Ending Offshoring Act,” anti-outsourcing legislation proposed in the United States Senate, failed a cloture motion even as Members of Congress were heading home to campaign for the midterm elections.

With a high unemployment rate and changed political landscape, the U.S. is under increased pressure to improve its competitiveness in the world. In his State of the Union address, President Obama focused on improving education and encouraging innovation in energy and technology but avoided any direct references to outsourcing. Proponents of the legal process outsourcing industry herald last Friday’s appointment of General Electric Co. CEO Jeffrey Immelt, dubbed the “King of Outsourcing” in the conservative blogosphere, as a top economic advisor to the President. It remains to be seen how the Obama Administration will address the burgeoning demand for services provided by companies like Pangea3.

Filed under: Legal Process Outsourcing