Fast Facts

Law education in India

-500 law schools

-Law students graduating from Indian law schools: Estimates range from 40,000 / year¹ to 200,000 / year as reported by the Wall Street Journal (September, 2005)

-272 universities² graduating over 3.3 million students annually.³ (In addition, there are over 2400 colleges for professional training²)

-Approximately 6 million attorneys in India (estimation).

Offshore Legal Job Estimates

Forrester Research predicts that 40,400 lawyer positions, or the equivalent of $4.3 billion in U.S. wages, will be outsourced overseas by the year 2015. If one includes paralegals and legal assistants, the number grows to 79,000 jobs, or $5.8 billion in wages.

The Tasks

The legal services that have been effectively outsourced to India by U.S. corporations and law firms include:

Legal transcription
Database creation and/or maintenance
Scanning / indexing evidence
Document coding
Document review / annotation
Document processing / management
Form creation
Document drafting
Legal research
Patent drafting

The majority of outsourced work falls into one of these areas of law:

Complex Litigation
Mergers and Acquisitions
Bankruptcy
Patents
Regulation Compliance

Sources:

¹Cornell Law School: Overview of Legal Systems in the Asia-Pacific Region—India (2004)

²Department of Education, Government of India: Educational Statistics (2002)
See http://www.education.nic.in/htmlweb/edusta.htm

³Fortune (July 22, 2005): Is America the World's 97-lb. Weakling?
See http://www.mutualofamerica.com/articles/Fortune/July2005/Fortune.asp