PANGEA3 LLC

Pangea3 has learned that the lawsuit filed earlier this year in the D.C. District Court challenging the legality of offshore legal outsourcing has been withdrawn by the Plaintiff firm, Bethesda, Maryland-based Newman, McIntosh & Hennessey.

The withdrawal comes only days after the American Bar Association (ABA) issued a formal ethics opinion that not only approves but endorses the use of legal outsourcing providers as a method to extend in-house capacity and to reduce costs. Please see our blog posting of August 27th entitled ABA Blesses Use of Legal Outsourcing; August ABA Ethics Opinion Confirms that Offshoring Legal Work is Ethical.

At this time, we can only assume that the Plaintiff firm realized the futility of prosecuting their suit in the shadow of the ABA’s opinion, and the opinions of the New York City Bar Association, Florida State Bar Association, San Diego County Bar Association and the Los Angeles County Bar Association, each of which affirmed that the use of offshore legal services providers like Pangea3 does not violate any ethical rules or regulations.

Please watch this space for more details on this development as they become available.

Following in the footsteps of the New York City Bar Association, Florida State Bar Association, San Diego County Bar Association and the Los Angeles County Bar Association, the American Bar Association officially issued an ethics opinion that not only approves but endorses the use of legal outsourcing providers as a method to extend in-house capacity and to reduce costs.

Interestingly, the ABA does not distinguish between utilizing a legal process outsourcing provider such as Pangea3 and utilizing temporary attorneys for document review, a document management company for litigation or a legal research service. According to the ABA, all of these providers fall within the realm of legal outsourcing.

Similar to every ethics opinion about legal outsourcing, ABA Ethics Opinion 08-451 provides guidelines for attorneys in order to maintain compliance with Rules 1.1, 5.1 and 5.3, disclosure of the outsourcing relationship to the client, maintaining client confidentiality and disclosing the outsourcing relationship to the underlying client, among others.

The ABA ethics opinion validates what all of our clients, including our many Fortune 500 and Am Law 200 clients, have already studied and concluded – that the use of offshore legal outsourcing providers is indeed ethical.

Here is the full ABA Ethics Opinion .

The USPTO recently issued a notice regarding the outsourcing of patent prosecution work to foreign countries. It has become a hot topic in numerous IP blogs as bloggers speculate whether this notice ends patent outsourcing. To educate our clients and other interested parties, we’ve written a formal response explaining how the notice impacts the current patent prosecution work outsourced to India. A copy of it is below:

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (“USPTO”) recently issued a Notice in the Federal Register (Vol. 73, No. 142/Wednesday, July 23, 2008/Notices) titled, “Scope of Foreign Filing Licenses.” The Notice is directed toward the export of subject matter pursuant to a license from the USPTO.

The Notice reminds applicants and registered patent practitioners that the export of subject matter pursuant to a license from the USPTO is limited to the filing of foreign patent applications. More as a reiteration than a departure from existing law or regulations, the Notice serves as a reminder that exporting of subject matter for any purpose other than the filing of foreign patent applications (post a foreign filing license from the USPTO), requires obtaining the appropriate clearance from the Bureau of Industry and Security at the Department of Commerce.

The Notice does not purport to change or adversely affect the export of subject matter to, for example, an LPO. To the contrary, it addresses any doubts or confusion in connection with such an export. Stating it succinctly, export of any subject matter that does not require an export license is unaffected by the Notice.

The foregoing is in accordance with the Export Administration Regulations promulgated by the Bureau of Industry and Security that governs exports of various commodities, software and technology. Indeed, the Notice ends by stating that it “does not change existing law or regulations.” We agree.