PANGEA3 LLC

I read a post the other day on Yahoo’s lit support group message board where the poster publicly thanked all that there were still domestic reproduction shops that could compete with all of the offshore coders that seemed to be plaguing him, and it made me think about why someone felt it necessary to make such a comment. Actually, the poster’s original request sought repro houses that kept everything under one roof. Presumably, the poster had chain of custody concerns; I don’t know; he didn’t say why he wanted the self-contained one shop coding op. The odd part was that it didn’t appear that the poster even wanted to find a coding operation in a certain location; he just wanted to identify on-shore all-in-one coding shops.

Regardless, that post bothered me. I didn’t like the jingoistic undercurrent running through its seemingly fresh realization that, yes, Virginia, there are onshore reproduction shops that can copy and process your data all in one place in America! I know that companies have provided offshore objective coding since the 1970s and the Filipino pioneers have been joined by others in India and other low cost jurisdictions. But are they the norm or the exception? So why the hostility?

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My initial guess is that the poster had a negative reaction to the granularization of the coding process and the outsourcing (onshore or offshore) by repro companies of certain processing tasks either to central processing facilities or to subcontractors. But the post didn’t explain why it sought those types of seemingly unique businesses.

Maybe the poster had security concerns and didn’t want his documents to leave his local jurisdiction. We’ve had clients with hundreds of boxes of documents who could have saved thousands of dollars if they had just shipped the docs to Texas or Minnesota instead of keeping them within ten miles of corporate headquarters who refused to ship their documents outside their city for copying. The limitation was completely reasonable. Scanning equipment and technology has gotten to the point where a good vendor can bring three or four machines and the crews to staff them onsite and scan all the images at the warehouse or the office and then transmit them back to the vendor’s central processing facility in Waco or Eden Prarie or India. Then again, even those clients didn’t require that all the work be done under one roof.

Or perhaps, I guessed is that maybe the poster had been inundated with spam from aggressive offshore operations and just wanted to reaffirm that dependable American talent was still out there.

I was, shocked, strenuously shocked, however, to find the truth sitting in plain sight. The post was nothing more than a plant by – care to take a guess? – a onshore coding vendor with three “regional” locations in the United States (all happen to be in Texas).

I’ve never worked with that vendor. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt that they do a good job for their customers. But the proprietor apparently doesn’t believe that his reputation, the service he provides or the value he delivers is up to snuff to convince clients to stick with him so he implies in a brief post that offshore is the threat to an American way of life and he’s the savior.

Please. As Tom O’Connor (echoing Craig Ball, a Texan himself) concluded in the August 2007 edition of Law Technology News, the poster is in a commodity business and his best value proposition is apparently, “I’m under one American roof!” The “use me because of them and not because of me” strategy isn’t new. We’ve seen domestic vendors in the staffing space trying to ferment distrust about substantive offshore litigation service providers in the guise of placed editorial articles by relying on little more than hyperbole that appeals to a long standing intangible territoriality in litigators.

But the educated consumer, who can read into vendor bylines and between knee-jerk xenophobic headlines, knows that the outsourcing vendors are grabbing the market share have figured out that in today’s world, clients don’t believe that is necessarily the best way to handle commodity work. Instead, that consumer wants the best work, with peace of mind, at a compelling price – regardless of where the work is performed onshore or off.