Offshoring Lawyers Saves Money

Business Week reports:

On the seventh floor of an old office building on the outskirts of Manila, 30 Filipino attorneys, including three who have passed U.S. bar exams, are seated elbow-to-elbow with 50 other staff at long tables crammed with PCs. Working in three shifts seven days a week, they read, analyze, and annotate digital images of memos, payroll and medical records, old engineering specs, and other documents that might be used as evidence in DuPont legal cases.

The operation is part of a tieup between DuPont and offshoring shop OfficeTiger (RRD ) that is testing the limits of how far legal services outsourcing can go. Attorneys and others in OfficeTiger's Philippines and India offices are helping out on more than a dozen projects, from monitoring old contracts and licensing agreements to managing documentary evidence for product-liability cases. "We want to be the center of excellence for this whole area of offshore document management," says DuPont assistant general counsel Thomas L. Sager.

The most important project is processing 2 million pages of documents vital to a DuPont case against 10 insurers. DuPont aims to recover more than $100 million in payouts to thousands of former pipefitters, insulators, mechanics, and other workers who claimed their illnesses came from exposure to asbestos in DuPont facilities. Much of the work is tedious: digitizing and indexing decades-old paperwork. But some requires judgment normally provided by U.S. lawyers, such as determining whether documents are relevant to a case or violate confidentiality.

Competiton is in the air.Some of these urban areas that have a lot of legal work might not have as much in the future.