PANGEA3 LLC

A recent piece in the ABA Journal cites an article in the Columbia Law Journal, which article asserts that the ethical rules for using and supervising Legal Process Outsourcing (LPO) providers are unclear, and that the legal industry needs clarity on these rules since American corporations and law firms are increasing their use of and reliance on offshore legal outsourcing companies. What nonsense, and what an uninformed attempt to yet again spread fear, uncertainty and doubt. If the last refuge of people opposed to real competition is to spread fear about a dislocative industry or technology, then outsourcing legal services to India is clearly working.

Pangea3’s operations and business model are specifically engineered to comply with state practice of law statutes, at both the client and provider levels.

Having spent the entirety of our professional careers as lawyers, when my Co-CEO Sanjay Kamlani (like me - Penn Law JD 1994) and I founded Pangea3 one of the first things that we dealt with was to ensure that our model of using American and Indian lawyers to provide legal services to in-house counsel and their law firms comported with practice of law statutes. In fact, we consulted with Geoffrey Hazard, our former Penn Law professor, and one of America’s leading authorities on Legal Ethics to make sure that our model complied with practice of law restrictions under the Model Rules and New York State’s Disciplinary rules.

In early 2005, Professor Hazard reviewed the Model Rules (including Rule 5.5), New York’s Disciplinary Rules and caselaw, and provided Pangea3 with a legal opinion that an offshore legal service operation that was a facsimile of Pangea3’s business model would not trigger any practice of law issues.

Importantly, Professor Hazard opined that there would be no danger to preserving privilege if a U.S. attorney used Pangea3’s services because Pangea3 works as an agent for the delegating attorney.

The lesson here is that so long as the delegating attorney instructs the Indian attorneys that the communications and work product are privileged and makes sure that the Indian attorneys understand that guidance and instruction, then the delegating attorney has complied with his professional responsibilities and the privilege will be preserved. In that case, Pangea3 is no different

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