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Outsourcing: The Next Generation

By Lisa R. Smith

Outsourcing is top of the news in many industries, and the legal industry is no exception. Recent news reports and editorials comment exhaustively on many aspects of outsourcing, and for any of those aspects you can find someone who will opine convincingly at either end of the spectrum. Either it's good for the U.S. economy or it takes away jobs. The quality provided in places like India is superior, or companies like Dell are pulling back. The U.S. will lose its edge in software development, or it will focus only on the higher-end intellectual work. All that being said, employers need to consider that baby boomers are retiring and the size of the U.S. workforce is going to be increasingly below demand through 2020 ' at which point the gap is projected to be 24 million jobs, including 14 million white collar jobs. At some point, outsourcing may become a necessity.

Outsourcing is a term that is used fairly broadly to mean a number of things. We would define outsourcing as the provision of a firm's service by another service provider. This can be done in-house with dedicated staff (like most of the copy operations), it can be done offsite with dedicated staff, or it can be done offsite in a shared service center. Offsite can mean across the street, across the country or across the world. The word that is generally used to describe services provided outside the U.S., often in either India or the Philippines, is offshoring.

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