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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than a consulting expert, a secretary, paralegal, a printer, an E-Discovery vendor or any other party that assists a lawyer in his daily duties. The fact that the services take place in India is irrelevant except for the consideration of distance and how you bridge that distance.

And that is where Pangea3 thrives. We have American attorneys with over sixty years of combined experience on-site in Mumbai to help our attorneys understand the legal and business environment that they are working in everyday. We also have a strong team of American attorneys in the U.S. to facilitate those conversations with our clients. In other words, we strive to make your job easier by structuring and facilitating the processes, be they for document review, contract management, research, intellectual property or any of our other services. But we also have Indian attorneys who have been with us for over three years and have been trained in U.S. law and business principals under our guidance and who now have a remarkably strong sense of the American (and European) legal market and professional responsibilities. As we continue to grow in size and longevity, many of our Indian team members have a vastly greater understanding of these issues than any third year American law student could ever claim.

In sum, the Hazard opinion divines that the guidance our clients need is already there for all attorneys to see and know. Attorneys have worked across borders and with non-lawyers for many years now. And we aren’t aware of any case that has held that documents or communications that were shared with parties outside of the United States lost their privilege by sole virtue of the fact that the conversation escaped the physical boundaries of the United States. Any such limitation today, would, in fact, be laughable given the international economy and the availability of plentiful high-speed broadband communication lines and a wealth of competent talent around the globe and the management to harness that talent.

At Pangea3, we are proud to be at the forefront of one of the most exciting new areas in the legal services arena. And make no mistake, we have to tread carefully because of that and it takes much hard work and careful consideration to make sure that we do it smarter and better and to give our clients the peace of mind that they deserve. We are confident that we do that.

We actually give a CLE on this topic and would be happy to talk with you more about the professional responsibility requirements in the U.S. As with the Hazard opinion, please write us at info@pangea3.com if you’d like to review these CLE materials. But rest assured that the projects we have undertaken for all of our clients have been carried in complete compliance with New York State and Model Rules of Professional Responsibility requirements.