PANGEA3 LLC

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 .