Outsourcing Lawyers
Lawyers moving to India Article

NOIDA, India — As an assistant attorney general for New York State, Christopher Wheeler used to spend most of his time arguing in courtrooms in New York City.

Today, he works in a sprawling, unfinished planned suburb of New Delhi, where office buildings are sprouting from empty lots and dirt roads are fringed with fresh juice stalls and construction rubble. At Pangea3, a legal outsourcing firm, Mr. Wheeler manages a team of 110 Indian lawyers who do the grunt work traditionally assigned to young lawyers in the United States — at a fraction of the cost.

India’s legal outsourcing industry has grown in recent years from an experimental endeavor to a small but mainstream part of the global business of law. Cash-conscious Wall Street banks, mining giants, insurance firms and industrial conglomerates are hiring lawyers in India for document review, due diligence, contract management and more.

Now, to win new clients and take on more sophisticated work, legal outsourcing firms in India are actively recruiting experienced lawyers from the West. And American and British lawyers — who might once have turned up their noses at the idea of moving to India, or harbored an outright hostility to outsourcing legal work in principle — are re-evaluating the sector.

The number of legal outsourcing companies in India has mushroomed to more than 140 at the end of 2009, from 40 in 2005, according to Valuenotes, a consulting firm in Pune, India. Revenue at India’s legal outsourcing firms is expected to grow to $440 million this year, up 38 percent from 2008, and should surpass $1 billion by 2014, Valuenotes estimates.

“This is not a blip, this is a big historical movement,” said David B. Wilkins, director of Harvard Law School’s program on the legal profession. “There is an increasing pressure by clients to reduce costs and increase efficiency,” he added, and with companies already familiar with outsourcing tasks like information technology work to India, legal services is a natural next step.

So far, the number of Western lawyers moving to outsourcing companies could be called more of a trickle than a flood. But that may change, as more business flows out of traditional law firms and into India. Compensation for top managers at legal outsourcing firms is competitive with salaries at midsize law firms outside of major metropolitan areas of the United States, executives in the industry say. Living costs are much lower in India, and often, there is the added allure of stock in the outsourcing company.
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America is in for a long decline.

"And we was like the Roman Empire... America was like the Roman Empire."

"It was once."

Could well be. There is a lot of anger out there.

I remember taking a freshman speech class in college. This was 1977. My professor, Dr. Schwartz, told us very matter-of-factly, that in America, the rich would get richer, and the poor would get poorer, until there was blood in the streets.

It's 33 years later and I can't help but think of that statement whenever I see the look of anger and hate among the urban poor. It's scary. They feel they have nothing to lose, and I really can't say that I blame them.

It's more than the urban poor. I notice people everywhere are tense, easy to lose their cool, and just plain hostile.

My husband was recently in Chennai to visit with a company that his outsources to, and he was shocked. He described it as a collision of the ancient and the future. As they walked through the office building, they passed tons of cubicles, each with a different company logo, obviously the American companies that have hired them.

Americans are stupid. We allowed companies to send our manufacturing jobs overseas, but we didn't care because those were "dirty" jobs. However, we have been losing white collar, six figure jobs by the thousands. At this rate, the economy will never recover. Those jobs can't be replaced.

But SB, isn't it a businessman's right to maximize the return on his investment by minimizing costs?

And isn't it short-sighted of that same businessperson to cut costs to the point where it adds to a poor economy? Who will be left to buy the goods or services that the company produces??

This is not a recovery
This Is Not a Recovery
By PAUL KRUGMAN
What will Ben Bernanke, the Fed chairman, say in his big speech Friday in Jackson Hole, Wyo.? Will he hint at new steps to boost the economy? Stay tuned.

But we can safely predict what he and other officials will say about where we are right now: that the economy is continuing to recover, albeit more slowly than they would like. Unfortunately, that’s not true: this isn’t a recovery, in any sense that matters. And policy makers should be doing everything they can to change that fact.

The small sliver of truth in claims of continuing recovery is the fact that G.D.P. is still rising: we’re not in a classic recession, in which everything goes down. But so what?

The important question is whether growth is fast enough to bring down sky-high unemployment. We need about 2.5 percent growth just to keep unemployment from rising, and much faster growth to bring it significantly down. Yet growth is currently running somewhere between 1 and 2 percent, with a good chance that it will slow even further in the months ahead. Will the economy actually enter a double dip, with G.D.P. shrinking? Who cares? If unemployment rises for the rest of this year, which seems likely, it won’t matter whether the G.D.P. numbers are slightly positive or slightly negative.

All of this is obvious. Yet policy makers are in denial...

Economist N. Gregory Mankiew who writes many of the textbooks used in business school curriculum mentioned today that investment tax credits would have HUGE short term impacts on the economy and I can't believe team Obama isn't embracing this yet.

Probably because it doesn't work.
Seriously though Mankiw is more honest than some of his fellow neoconomists but we had eight years of following their suggestions to a T and that landed us where we are today. Mankiw, Hubbard, Lindsey and other assorted right wing economists are discussed in the 2005 book "Neoconomy" by Daniel Altman, which proved to be quite prescient. I am reading that book now and perhaps will review it at some point.

Bottom line is that "free market" supply side economics has been tried and failed. But it was quite successful at increasing wealth for the rich and increasing job "flexibility" for the rest of the nation.

http://www.slate.com/id/2100251
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/06/brer_furman_and.html

Unemployment rises slightly in August to 9.6%

By Don Lee, Los Angeles Times

Reporting from Washington — The nation's jobless rate worsened slightly last month, edging up to 9.6% from 9.5% in July, the government said Friday in a report that had little for workers to cheer about this Labor Day weekend.

Overall, the American economy lost 54,000 net jobs in August as another 114,000 temporary census workers were dismissed from the federal government's payrolls. Aside from the staffing changes at the Census Bureau, which has been trimming jobs added earlier in the year for the decennial population count, private-sector employers added a modest 67,000 jobs over the month.

The nation's manufacturers, which had been growing all year and leading the weak jobs recovery, fell back in August, cutting 27,000 from their payrolls. Budget-strapped state governments shed another 14,000 jobs.

The healthcare sector added 28,000 jobs in August, and construction employment was up 19,000, although about half of that was due to the return of workers on strike in July. The temporary-help industry, considered a precursor to broader hiring, also rebounded, increasing staffing by 17,000 last month.

The Labor Department also revised up the private-sector hiring in June and July, saying businesses added 168,000 in those two months instead of 102,000 estimated earlier. Even so, by any measure, those numbers are small and not nearly enough to begin to bring down the unemployment rate, which is expected to climb in the coming months.

Nearly 15 million workers were counted as jobless last month. Including people too discouraged to look for work and the nearly 9 million workers who have little choice but to work part-time, the rate of the nation's unemployed and underemployed stood at 16.7% last month, up from 16.5% in July.

"The small amount of job gains during the past few months not only reflects the response to slow output growth, but also a lack of confidence going forward," said Bart van Ark, chief economist at the Conference Board, a business research group based in New York. "The economy as a whole has been weakened by a dismal housing market and slow consumption, which especially hamper small- and medium-sized enterprises."

William Dunkelberg, chief economist for the National Federation of Independent Business, said that his group's monthly survey of small employers showed that most firms made little change to employment in August. He said 11% of the respondents reported that they had increased employment by an average of 2.3 employees, but 13% reduced their workforces by an average of 3.5 workers.

"Job creation still has not crossed the zero line in the small-business sector," he said.

don.lee@latimes.com
Copyright © 2010, Los Angeles Times

Dont worry everyone. Obamas stimulus package will kick in soon. LOL.

ds

The dems have controlled congress since 2006.

The dems have controlled congress since 2006. Throw the bums out.

ds

Only since January, 2007.

Clinton followed their suggestions in 1997 when the Republican Senate initiated the pro growth capital gains tax cut and this led to the boom of the late 90's. It's a common misconception that Clinton' tax hikes in the early 90's led to the later boom but this theory has been proven inadequate. The economy boomed in the late 90's in large part due to the Republican initiated tax cuts and remained so until Sept 11 2001.

That wasn't the case at all. The 1997 tax cut wasn't initiated by Republicans but by Clinton. It wasn't signed until August of 1997 and most of it didn't go into effect until 1998. It started out in the spring of 97 as Clinton's bill -Middle Class Bill of rights- and was ultimately supported by Democrats (164-41 in the House and 37-8 in the Senate)

The deficits had already been declining since 1993, which given Clinton tax policy, should not have been happening according to right wing economic models. By 1997 the deficit was almost gone.

There was a boom throughout the nineties, not just post 1998. I don't see how anyone could argue that. The facts are otherwise. I know that Clinton left a bad taste in some conservative mouths (pun definitely intended ) but we can't change history because some folks didn't like him.

Who created the 1990's surplus?

In that 1997 bill was the child tax credit which was opposed by Republicans, increased tax free rules for certain savings accounts, exemption on capital gain taxation on primary residence for up to $500K and other things which were aimed primarily at the middle class, not the rich.

Much of this logic was included in the recent 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act which was of course bitterly opposed by Republicans. Why? Because of politics.

"Today, the top federal income-tax rate for ordinary income is 35 percent, meaning that earned income is taxed at a rate 2-1/3 times higher than income from capital gains. That’s simply unfair. There is no good reason for wealth to be taxed at a lower rate than work."
http://www.ctj.org/pdf/regcg.pdf

Your grasp for revisionist history is astounding, Frank .

I'm a Democrat who didn't even like the Clintons from Day One, but give me a break. There might be some evidence that the economic downturn started during the second half of Clinton's second term, but there's no denying the fact that the deficit that Clinton inherited in '92 (when I voted against him), was all but gone by late '96 (when I voted for him).

They were indeed GOP initiated but of course Clinton gets credit b/c he was in office. Since when are capital gains tax cuts a Democratic strategy? That's why the current capital gains tax cuts were initiated by Bush and will expire at the end of this year because Obama will NOT be renewing them??

"Only a few weeks before the 1997 act was finally approved, Clinton promised that he would never sign anything like the unfair, budget-busting tax bills then pending in Congress...that promise turned out to be an empty one." Source

It seems likely, though admittedly less certain, that the Clinton tax increases in 1993, while not derailing the economy as many had forecast at the time, did indeed slow the recovery compared to what the economy could have achieved. We were coming out of the 90-91 recession that had been preceded by 8 straight periods of economic growth and so strong economic expansion was expected, but that expansion would, could have been even higher without the Clinton tax hikes.

The economy should have cooled in 1997 but it didn't thanks to Republican tax cuts. As far as evidence for the 'real boom' occuring in the later portion of the decade: The economy averaged 4.2 percent real growth per year from 1997 to 2000--a full percentage point higher than during the expansion following the 1993 tax hike. Employment increased by another 11.5 million jobs, which is roughly comparable to the job growth in the preceding four-year period. Real wages, however, grew at 6.5 percent, which is much stronger than the 0.8 percent growth of the preceding period. Finally, total market capitalization of the S&P 500 rose an astounding 95 percent. The period from 1997 to 2000 forms the memory of the booming 1990s, and it followed the passage of tax relief that was originally opposed by President Clinton.

Again, it's the other way around. It was a Republican-led Congress that passed a tax-relief and deficit-reduction bill that was resisted but ultimately signed by President Clinton. The bill among other things lowered the top capital gains tax rate from 28 percent to 20 percent and created a new $500 child tax credit.

"Only a few weeks before the 1997 act was finally approved, Clinton promised that he would never sign anything like the unfair, budget-busting tax bills then pending in Congress...that promise turned out to be an empty one." Source

It was President Clinton that ushered through Congress a large package of tax increases, which included the following: An increase in the individual income tax rate to 36 percent and a 10 percent surcharge for the highest earners, thereby effectively creating a top rate of 39.6 percent.


There's a reason that ultra conservatives like Sam Walton voted for Clinton and it wasn't b/c they share the same home state of Arkansas; Clinton is a brilliant man who supported business and REAL economic growth.

But you have to go back and look at the advantageous historical circumstances that were prevelant when Clinton took office: The end of the Cold War brought a new sense of hope and greater certainty to the global economy. The price of energy was astoundingly low, with oil prices dropping to about $11 per barrel and averaging under $20 per barrel compared to prices above $90 per barrel today. The Federal Reserve had finally succeeded in establishing a significant degree of price stability, with inflation averaging less than 2 percent during the Clinton Administration. And, of course, a tremendous set of new productivity-enhancing technologies involving information technologies and the World Wide Web burst on the scene.

AGain, in 1997, at a time when the expansion was well along and economic growth should have slowed, Congress passed a modest net tax cut. The economy grew by a full percentage point-per-year faster over his second term than over Clinton's first term.

FN, you appear to be arguing that anything that was good that happened under Clinton either had nothing to do with Clinton's policies, could have been even better if Republican policies were followed, or was actually the result of previous Republican administrations.

The 1993 Clinton tax policies were anathema to Republicans at the time. They hated them and said so loudly. They all predicted doom and gloom, rising deficits, higher interest rates, and basically the end of Western civilization as we knew it. And yet the exact opposite happened.

Usually when reality doesn't fit with a theory that means the theory needs adjusting.

If Clinton detractors want to argue that Clinton's achievements ( performance of economy under Clinton) must be measured against what would have happened if their advice had been followed, then to be consistent they must sign on to Obama's current argument that things would have been even worse if the stimulus hadn't been done. However it's rare that you see Republicans do that. When it comes to Obama they're not interested in measuring actuals against hypotheticals.

Actual GDP growth rates for US
http://www.tradingeconomics.com/Economics/GDP-Growth.aspx?Symbol=USD
http://www.bea.gov/national/index.htm#gdp

If you want to argue that tax cuts are in and of themselves stimulative, you would have to explain why despite greater tax cuts and associated deregulation, we have had such poor economic growth under the second President Bush where Republicans had the Senate, House and Presidency and had free reign to put their theories into practice. The evidence was in on that which is why we have President Obama today. Time will tell what sort of job he does. But I don't think you can give Republicans credit for the good years of the 1990's.

http://latest-newsonline.com/business-an...the-real-story/

FN, you've got to wean yourself from the Hertiage Foundation and other conservative thinktanks. There are a huge amount of variables that can affect the national economy and its components. Specifically, I've always observed that, given a lower capital gains tax, investors will tend to leave their investments in place long term and, thus, not circulating through the economy. Of course, a robust economy depends on circulation.

Do you consider this nation's system of University business colleges to be conservative think-tanks? If so I'd have to question your motives. I'm talking about strict quantitative economic analysis that is unpartial and unbiased. I see your point about circulation so then why not promote business expansion and growth instead of simply raising taxes which inevitably results in a redistribution of wealth to the poor who in many cases will simply squander it away.

Ole Billy did a great job of balancing the budget but as I noted above the economy improved a point per year in the later 90's after the Republican tax cuts took hold in 97 offseting Clinton's tax hikes of '93. We can raise taxes on the rich and give it to the poor, or we can continue to reinvest the money in the largest economy in the world and help us ALL. The economy was already set to boom at the turn of the internet age and there's nothing to indicate that tax hikes help anyone.

September 11th and the literal destruction of our financial center. No matter who or what was responsible for the boom of the 90's (in both the first AND second half of the decade) the data I presented above shows clearly the nation would have continued on a path of economic prosperity until that fateful day in September.

This is a great discussion and I don't have a political axe to grind but those who insist that President Obama inherited an economic 'mess' from Bush and that Bush is responsible for the bank bail-outs need to consider some other factors:

-It was Clinton in 1999 who signed into law the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act which repealed the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. The "Glass-Steagall was passed by Congress to prohibit banks from owning full-service brokerage firms and vice versa so investment banking activities, such as underwriting corporate or municipal securities, couldn’t be called into question and also to insulate bank depositors from the risks of a stock market collapse such as the one that precipitated the Great Depression." The repeal allowed Commercial and investment banks to consolidate and created much of the subprime lending that is now hitting the fan. Republicans in Congress fought against its repeal, but lobbyist from the banking industry managed to "convince" Democrats that the repeal would be in the Country's best interest. Now we are seeing the results of the Democrat economic policy.

-Those who assign culpability to Bush concerning the housing problem should keep in the mind that the whole thing started because there were more homes than there were people buying homes, and the people who bought mortgages for their home knew they weren't going to be able to pay them, which then caused foreclosures and now they want to resell them...

-As far as the auto crisis being pinned on Bush it's worth considering that the "Big Three" US auto makers' problems are a result of bad labor contracts, lousy products and incredibly incompetent management. A combination of all of those factors and a few more likely contributed to this mess.

-Obama inheriting two 'endless' wars is another topic for another day but surprise surprise the Obama administation has no intentions of pulling out of Afghanistan.

Point being: I'm a fiscal conservative but a social liberal and I agree with olivant that both sides make mistakes and the best solution is for dissenters to come together because only then will a true discourse produce viable sustained solutions.

BTW any investors looking to making a quick profit before Christmas invest in GOLD. Analysts on ALL sides see a continual increase in the value of gold well into next year.

I never said that, Frank. I even suggested that there's some evidence that the economic downturn began during the latter half of Slick Willie's second term.

Now I'm no Dubya apologist (I still think the man is borderline retarded), but he's not responsible for everything that's wrong with this country today. Iran is on him. They didn't attack us, and frankly I'm tired of playing Big Brother to the rest of the world when they're going to resent us anyway. But the seeds of the recession were probably already taking root when Dubya was sworn in, so he should get a little slack there.

Truth be told, every President inherits one kind of mess or another.

Tech Sector Slow to hire

This is a relatively long article so I won't reprint the whole thing here but since I work in this arena it was of interest to me. I could have told people this ten years ago. In fact I DID say something similar to my bosses. And so did just about every other American worker whose bonus didn't depend on how much of his team he outsourced..

But economists who follow highly skilled employment say that some of the most prominent companies that laid off workers during the recession, like I.B.M., are expanding their work forces abroad.

“Certainly a lot of these I.T. services firms plus the core software firms like Oracle are globalizing their work, or, as they put it, ‘rebalancing’ their work forces,” says Ronil Hira, an assistant professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

“There’s been this assumption that there’s a global hierarchy of work, that all the high-end service work, knowledge work, R.&D. work would stay in U.S., and that all the lower-end work would be transferred to emerging markets,” said Hal Salzman, a public policy professor at Rutgers and a senior faculty fellow at Heldrich Center for Workforce Development.

“That hierarchy has been upset, to say the least,” he said. “More and more of the innovation is coming out of the emerging markets, as part of this bottom-up push.”

The narrative is familiar to Ms. Mann, the unemployed software engineer. She said her employer, International Gaming Technology, initially told her office that it was opening a branch in China to work with the company’s casino clients in Macau and Australia.

She said she was told that the new branch would be tailoring products to local needs and doing some back-office work. But a year later it absorbed all the operations once performed by the Corvallis staff. International Gaming Technology, based in Reno, Nev., did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

**********

Well, I consider myself a fiscal conservative but a social libertarian as well, and the fact of the matter is that this economy is actually up 26% since the start of the Obama presidency. This despite just a 39% approval rating of his handling of the economy.

Why team Obama is not choosing to run on this is beyond me, but I think it has something to do with what some members of this board have noted as Obama's tendancy to stay in 'campaign mode'. Of course, the Obamaites also spent $850 billion to create 3 million jobs (roughly $300,000 per job) and that's not helping anyone. But he still has plenty of time to get the jobs market turned around and if he does, even if it's not exactly what conservatives want, I'd still vote for him b/c I know he's going to install more social legislation than any conservative will.

Obama's tax cut proposals are getting very little talk this week as well, and I think he's proposing them simply so conservatives will shut the hell up for a while. But don't forget that WALL STREET voted for this president in majority accepting the fact the economy needed more 'Keynesian' ideas and less pure free market economics. The left will say the policies are not Keynesian enough as they are hindered by right wing opposition, and the right alternatively says they're entirely too Keynesian, but that's all typical political fodder.

But anyone who says this President is too liberal in terms of fiscal policy should remember the old Warren Buffett adage, who always claimed that his secretary paid a higher percentage of her income in taxes than he did. And it's true, despite the accusations of Socialism that have been hurled at this administration the fact remains that Obama has not taken steps to abolish the estate tax (though it was in his right to do so), mutual fund fees remain untaxed for traders (big $$$ for Wall Street), and yes; the simple fact of the matter is that secretaries are often taxed at higher rates than their millionaire bosses!

But why would Obama raise taxes on the rich?! He is RICH! It's like basketball 'great' Charles Barkley said to his grandmother, who was upset at the fact that Chuck voted for Bush Sr. back in the day. To which Barkley replied: Grandma, of course I'm a Republican, I'm rich!

Tonight on The Kudlow Report they posed the question:"Is it fair for the guy making 40,000 a year to pay the same percentage in income tax as the guy making $400,000 year!?" I just don't know.

I remember a scene from "The West Wing", when Rob Lowe's character is talking about the fact that at his last job, he made hundreds of thousands per year. He was taxed at six times the national average; however, the fire department didn't come to his house six times faster, the water doesn't run from his tap six times colder, etc. He said that he paid his share and the share of six others. The vast majority of federal income taxes are paid by the highest wage earners.