At the risk of sound like someone reading off Twitter’s trending topics, two separate Above the Law posts caught my eye, especially when you put them together. The first was an interview with Gururaj Potnis, the director of Manthan Legal, one of the leading legal offshoring companies in India. His prediction? That sooner rather than later, outsourcing of mundane and mechanical legal work will become common place, with associates and partners in America being left to handle the higher minded questions in a case, as well as anything requiring an American bar license. (Please note that I’m using offshoring and outsourcing interchangeably) The result will likely be less US lawyers, no longer trudging through document review, but more efficient use of the 24 hours in a day (get the documents in the afternoon, send them to India where they are reviewed overnight, write your memo in the morning).
The second post was on whether work-life balance was still a viable cause to take up when the economy is putting employees at the mercy of their employers. The generally thought appears to be that work-life balance is simply going to be another piece of the compensation packages that get better when more lawyers are needed and worse when they aren’t. But the idea that law firms somehow owed it to associates to give them more time away from work is at this point a nonstarter.
But when you put these two ideas together, you get a vision of the future. Maybe it’s a utopia, maybe it’s the apocalypse, but it’s certainly a viable possibility. Jump in the time machine after the jump.
Let’s say that work-life balance remains at least a talking point. Let’s also assume that offshoring becomes the default way of doing business, meaning when a case comes in it’s separated into work that can be outsourced and work that needs to be done here.
A corporate law firm could look like a much happier and friendlier place in that case. Associates will no longer be pressured to bill hours on tasks like document review. Quite the opposite, associates will be needed to quickly recognize such work and get it off their plates, and instead focus their time on work that adds more value.
Removing the mechanical work from the plates of junior associates would seem to solve a lot of problems. A much higher percentage of their work is more interesting and meaningful. There is less work for the firm to do (assuming that the supply of legal work is finite, and clearly it is), so more time for associates. The pressures are on adding value to the outsourced work, managing that work as well as your own well, and not just on billing hours. Promotions based on skill and experience are more likely than those based on sheer effort. Sounds like exactly what Generation Y and other proponents of work-life balance are asking for.
Now the elephant in the room is that there will be fewer lawyers making less money. Some firms will ignore the work-life balance and just have fewer attorneys billing the same number of hours. Which for some attorneys will be great, since the work will be more enjoyable and meaningful on average. But with the pressure to simply do something (anything) you can bill for out of the picture, there will be the place for the attorney who works 75% as much, but gets paid 50% of the current going rate (value billing has the potential to make this the default model).
The question then would be whether the legal industry the stomach for fewer attorneys getting paid less to do less work that’s more interesting. Which also means fewer law schools, fewer paralegals, fewer secretaries, etc. And to wrap it in a tidy bow, this is what separates whiney entitlement from someone offering an alternative: the ability to accept the consequences of the choice. Whether today’s law students and associates and/or today’s law firms and partners are able to accept those consequences is a huge unanswered question.
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p style=”clear: both”>In this post: Outsourcing: What Indiana Firms Have Planned for the Future of Biglaw [Above the Law] Has Work-Life Balance Toppled Over Thanks to the Teetering Economy? [Above the Law]
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p style=”clear: both”>Previously on Fearfully Optimistic: Will the ABA’s Accreditation Review Lead to Fewer Law Schools?
