Legal Outsourcing Firms Creating Jobs for American Lawyers

Top American firms have cut hiring or moved to a lower-tier pay system for many new associates. Corporations are reducing their legal departments. Legal temp companies now pay as little as $20 a hour to board-certified lawyers for document reviews that a decade ago might have been billed at $200 an hour.

But there is at least one glimmer of light. And it comes from a surprising direction.

Outsourcing firms, the companies that in recent years added to the financial woes of the American legal profession by sending work to low-cost countries like India, are now creating jobs for lawyers in the United States.

The American salaries for outsourced work, typically in the $50,000 to $80,000 range, may look meager compared with the six figures that new associates might still hope to draw at a big firm. But outsourcing jobs typically pay better than temp work — and certainly better than no work at all.

And at that salary range, American lawyers start to look a bit more competitive with their offshore counterparts — and more attractive to potential American clients that might not be comfortable sending legal work overseas.

“If we’re going to deliver a fantastic client experience, the only way to do it is to have an onshore facility,” said Sanjay Kamlani, co-chief executive of Pangea3, a legal outsourcing firm with offices in New York and Mumbai.

Pangea3, which was bought by Thomson Reuters in November, has just opened a 400-seat office in Carrollton, Tex., a Dallas suburb. The new office means Pangea3 will have lawyers working during United States business hours, on tasks that, because of logistics or American law, can be difficult to perform outside the country — like writing and vetting export control documents, military contracts and some patent reviews.

Many of Pangea3’s main competitors are already doing legal work in the United States and have been hiring steadily in recent months. And though the industry’s total number of employees in the United States is still estimated to be only in the hundreds, analysts predict fast growth for the field.

Because legal outsourcing companies grew steadily during the recession as corporations trimmed legal staffs, the industry was able to attract investors like Thomson Reuters and Intermediate Capital Group. Now legal outsourcing companies and others are opening offices and hiring lawyers in lower-cost areas in the United States, like West Virginia and North Dakota.

Legal outsourcing companies employ about 16,000 people worldwide, according to Edward Brooks, founder of the LPO Program, which matches legal outsourcing companies with potential clients.

The industry made an estimated $400 million in revenue in 2010, according to the researcher The Datamonitor Group, which was just a tiny fraction of the world’s $200-billion-a-year legal market. But Datamonitor predicts legal outsourcing revenues will grow to $2.4 billion by 2012, based on the industry’s recent rapid expansion. In part because of the harsh economic climate of the last few years, “the reality is that the United States and the United Kingdom have many lower-cost locations and good supplies of legal professionals,” said Mark Ross, a vice president at Integreon, an outsourcing company based in Los Angeles.

Integreon has lawyers and paralegals in 17 offices around the world, including India and South Africa. But the company, which is now hiring lawyers and other legal professionals in its Fargo, N.D., and Bristol, England, offices, currently has about 500 employees in the United States and expects to have 600 by the end of the year.

In the United States, outsourcing companies are hiring lawyers from temporary legal services firms or recruiting them directly out of law school. The pay is often comparable to lawyers’ salaries in smaller cities. And the jobs can come with other benefits, like equity stakes in the company and management opportunities that might not be widely available at conventional law firms.

Lily Liu joined Pangea3’s new Texas office after six years as a temporary lawyer and previous experience as a trial lawyer in Texas.

View the original article here

E. Coli Strain Was Previously Unknown, Official Says

With hospitals coping with seriously ill victims, sectors of European agriculture staggering and consumers weighing what foods are safe to eat, Russia extended a ban on fresh vegetable imports beyond Spain and Germany to encompass all of the European Union, drawing a sharp response from European officials who called the move “disproportionate.”

In Geneva, Gregory Hartl, a spokesman for the World Health Organization, said, “What we understand is this is a strain which has never been detected in an outbreak situation before.” He said scientists at “many laboratories” were working to gather more information about the strain.

The origins of the outbreak, which has killed at least 17 people — 16 in Germany and a Swede who visited there recently — remain unknown. Ten countries have now reported cases, but virtually all of them have been traced to northern Germany, where the outbreak began several weeks ago.

In a statement on Thursday, a Chinese laboratory collaborating with German scientists said that the contagion had been caused by a “new strain of bacteria that is highly infectious and toxic.” The lab, the Beijing Genomics Institute in the southern city of Shenzhen, referred to the strain as “entirely new” and “super toxic,” saying it was similar to one known as EAEC 55989 that is found in the Central African Republic and known to cause serious diarrhea. The Chinese laboratory has been working with scientists at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf.

“The situation is still tense,” said Jörg Debatin, director of the medical center. “At the beginning of the week we had been hoping to see a trend towards fewer infections, but that has not happened.”

Holger Rohde, a bacteriologist at the medical center, said that tests conducted with the scientists in Shenzhen had shown that the new strain was a hybrid that causes the virulent complication called hemolytic uremic syndrome, which attacks the kidneys and can be lethal.

Dr. Rohde said that about 80 percent of the genetic composition derived from the E. coli strain O104, but that the other 20 percent came from another more toxic bacterium.

In recent days, the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control, a European Union agency based in Stockholm, and other health authorities in Europe had placed blame for the outbreak on a rare strain of E. coli called O104:H4.

Since 2008, only eight cases have been linked to the strain reported in the European Union, according to the agency, whose Web site was still reporting on Thursday that laboratory results indicated O104:H4 carried in contaminated food was “the causative agent” of the outbreak in Germany and had also been detected in Denmark.

Britain’s Health Protection Agency confirmed that the number of cases in Britain had risen to seven from three, with the bacteria found in people who had recently traveled to Germany.

The W.H.O. said that Austria reported 2 cases, Denmark 7, France 6, the Netherlands 4, Norway 1, Spain 1, Sweden 28 and Switzerland 2. The organization said that all but two were people who had recently visited northern Germany or, in one case, had contact with a visitor from northern Germany.

Quite apart from health concerns, the impact of the outbreak spread increasingly to European politics and the Continent’s economic relations.

Russian news reports quoted health officials as saying that Moscow’s ban on European produce would begin immediately. If strictly enforced, the prohibition would magnify the woes of European Union farmers since Russia ranks among their biggest markets. Farmers in Germany and Spain have already complained that public fear of contagion has forced them to destroy their crops.

The spokesman for John Dalli, the European Union health commissioner, said the commission would send a letter later on Thursday to Moscow explaining why Russia should remove the restrictions. Russia relies on imports from the European Union for up to 40 percent of its fruits and vegetables and the market is worth up to $5.5 billion annually, according to the commission.

Late on Wednesday, the European Commission removed an alert about the possible dangers of infection from Spanish cucumbers that the German authorities originally suspected were responsible. The commission said it lifted the alert after tests conducted by the German and Spanish authorities failed to detect the strain of E. coli that caused the illnesses. Mr. Dalli urged the German authorities and other national authorities to “increase their efforts” to identify the source of the contamination.

Germans expressed growing anxiety.

When Sarah Winter, a 22-year-old economics student from Cologne,  first heard about the outbreak, she simply shrugged. “Another typical German food scare,” she said. “We have these scares once a year. One time it’s about contaminated eggs. Another time it’s about fodder fed to pigs. And then you get all this media panic. I ended up simply ignoring all of it.”

But by Thursday, Ms. Winter had changed her mind.

“It’s a big conversation issue among my friends,” she said. “Some are no longer eating salads. Others are ignoring the medical recommendations. As for myself, frankly, people have died. For me, that’s the bottom line. I no longer eat salads. But then again, this E. coli strain could be in milk, meat, whatever. It is very worrying. I have no idea what to eat anymore.”

Alan Cowell reported from Berlin, and James Kanter from Brussels. Judy Dempsey contributed reporting.

View the original article here