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Not many lawyers, unlike freedom fighters, would rue being "children of Macaulay" these days. The dollars and pounds are ringing in, thanks to Thomas Babington Macaulay's legal foundation. Azim Premjis and Narayana Murthys sold Indian technology services to the world. The TVS family and Baba Kalyanis sold auto expertise. But it is the much-hated 19th century British bureaucrat, Macaulay, who is helping a new breed of business emerge in the nation, legal process outsourcing (LPO). "We feel India has a unique advantage of having its own legal system in English," says Jonathan Kelly, partner at Simmons & Simmons, a U.K. law firm. "Thus, there is no language barrier for Indian lawyers when they wade through legal documents of the U.S. and British companies." The laws of most former British colonies have similar foundations and in India, Macaulay set up an educational and legal framework that would in his words create "a class of persons, Indian in blood and color, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect". The nascent LPO industry is expected to grow 30% in the next two years, forecasts Pune-based research firm ValueNotes, which tracks the sector. The LPO business in India increased to $250 million in March 2009 from $146 million in 2007. The Great Recession in 2008 in the developed nations is helping the legal services companies grow, unlike their technology counterparts which saw orders slide, as companies such as Citigroup and Bank of America cut technology spending. Clifford Chance, Eversheds, Simmons & Simmons and Osborne Clarke, some of the top global legal firms, are outsourcing some work to Indian companies such as Integreon, MindCrest, and Pangea3 as their clients cut fees as part of their overall cost reduction, although legal costs are a just a fraction of their overall expenses. In the U.S., companies used to pay an average $400 an hour for legal services and in India, it is getting less than a third of it. "Large corporates in the West have been outsourcing other processes for quite some time," says Neeraja Kandala, an analyst with ValueNotes. "Legal processes are the latest addition, given that firms are facing pressure to cut law budgets." The scope of LPO work includes reviewing and drafting legal contracts, reviewing claims, discovery procedures that complement litigation processes, and monitoring compliance by clients. Legal costs run into $100 million per annum on an average for the Fortune 500 companies. In case of companies in sectors such as technology and pharmaceuticals that deal with intellectual property, these can be as much as $200 million. Outsourcing to Indian companies can reduce these costs by more than half, say experts. "Due to the slowdown, our clients had to either squeeze more (value) out of the same legal budget or cut the spends. This made us think about ways to improve client servicing at lower costs," says Simmons & Simmons' Kelly. "There was a need to innovate servicing without sacrificing quality." With £250 million in revenue, Simmons & Simmons (S&S) is among the top 10 law firms in the U.K. It recently outsourced back-end legal processes to the Mumbai-based LPO Integreon for one year. The scope of work includes litigation reviews, due diligence exercise, and financial transaction analysis. With this, Mr Kelly expects to bring down costs by 30-50%. The familiarity of the English legal systems gives an advantage to Indian companies in as much that they just don't perform the clerical function given to them, but also end up doing more than what they are just paid for. Pangea3's staff helped a U.S. logistics company avoid multi-million dollar law suits for corrupt practices as it studied millions of documents to avoid price-fixing charges. "The team reviewed over a million complex pricing and purchase order documents spanning over a period of eight years," says Sanjay Kamlani, co-CEO at Pangea3. "The client was exposed to the hidden danger of violating the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act." Thanks to the expertise, the orders are flowing in and new jobs are created. "We have seen a two-fold rise in contract value in the past two years. The tenure of work has also increased from a few months to 3-5 years," says MindCrest's M.D. Rohan Dalal. Chicago-headquartered MindCrest has delivery centers in Mumbai and Pune. Its headcount has also seen a reciprocal rise from 400 lawyers in 2008 to more than 1,000. LPO initially appealed to large multinational corporations and law firms because of the economies of scale and wage cost arbitrage opportunities. However, small and mid-size legal markets are beginning to capitalize on the LPO phenomenon. LPO levels the playing field for smaller organizations, which might lack staff, resources and in-house expertise, allowing them to scale up operations quickly for a specific project or lawsuit. Although LPO began with low-end, back-office functions, firms now send more sophisticated work overseas. A growing range of legal services are outsourced across the globe, including data entry, legal transcription, pre-litigation documentation, legal research, due diligence, contract management and intellectual property services. While the most popular offshore destination is India, LPO is gaining momentum in other parts of the world, including China, Australia, South Korea and the Philippines. LPO is a complex process and is not the best solution for every organization. Below are the major advantages and pitfalls of outsourcing legal work to foreign markets: Advantages of LPO Cost Savings. Legal employees in overseas markets earn 30-70 percent lower wages than comparable employees in the U.S., allowing domestic firms to reap tremendous cost savings. Infrastructure costs in India and other overseas markets are also significantly lower. Round-the-Clock Operations. The 12-hour time difference between the U.S. and India permits 24/7 operations. Offshore teams can work through the night, resulting in quick turnaround time for pressing legal projects. Access to Global Labor Pool. India, China and other offshore destinations offer a large, trained labor force. India's labor force is predicted to increase at an average rate of 15 million per year, ensuring a large pool of qualified workers for law firms in the United States, Europe and other parts of the world where the demand for labor is increasing. Flexibility. Employing a combination of onshore and offshore talent allows companies to tailor their capabilities in response to workload and client demands. LPO also allows domestic firms to tap into global expertise that is lacking within the organization. Disadvantages of LPO A Dun and Bradstreet survey revealed that almost a quarter of outsourcing relationships fail in the first two years, and half fail within five years. Below are a few drawbacks to LPO: Cultural Differences. Offshoring work to foreign markets introduces cultural and language barriers that could hinder communications between onshore and offshore teams. Confidentiality. Outsourcing sensitive legal information across the globe gives overseas vendors access to confidential information. Some people contend that sending legal work overseas constitutes a waiver of the attorney-client privilege because the U.S. government monitors cross-border communications, and foreign countries lack the privacy rights afforded by the U.S. Constitution. Communication Barriers. Many outsourcing ventures fail because of unclear expectations,poor vendor responsiveness, a lack of understanding and ineffective governance. Companies with multi-shore operations must dedicate time and resources to managing the offshore relationship, diverting attention from core business functions. Hidden Costs. In some instances, hidden costs undermine the cost benefits of outsourcing work overseas. Hidden costs include vendor management, quality control, contract management, employee turnover, vendor profit margins and increased operational costs. Geographical Hurdles. Relinquishing control of complex legal processes to a party across the globe can result in a loss of managerial control over people and processes. The practice of employing remote workers also can increase certain costs such as travel and training. Poor Infrastructure and Incomprehensibly Complex Bureaucracy Common knowledge suggest you can't squeeze water from a rock, but Sandeep Sood is trying to do something just as challenging - finding humor-and trouble-spots in the skyrocketing outsourcing industry. As dominant as outsourcing has become in today's global economy, and with plenty of controversy and media hype surrounding the practice, it still remains a relatively boring topic, populated by an alphabet soup of terms such as BPO, KPO, EPO and LPO, and unexplored for obstacles to smooth performance. Sood is doing his best to change that with "Doubtsourcing," a Web comic and e-mail newsletter that tackles the outsourcing industry with a comic sense of self-deprecating humor and insider observations. For Sood, the exercise is his way to comment on the inherent issues and problems of the outsourcing industry, as well as market his own Berkeley, Calif.-based software consultancy, Monsoon Company. A 1998 graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, with a bachelor's degree in economics, Sood worked for PeopleSoft for a year before kicking around with a number of starts-ups and eventually launching Monsoon as BCM Digital in 2001. The company has taken a "slow and steady approach," as Sood describes growth. Monsoon has six employees in the United States, with 90 workers in three Indian cities: Pune, Chandigarh and Mumbai. Customers include Wells Fargo & Co., Cisco Systems Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co. and Microsoft Corp. Sood believes it is important to have a sense of humor about the problems and challenges that have plagued the outsourcing industry. He feels too many companies pretend there are no problems and do not want to talk about them, which he said only compounds the situation. "I think it is important for one company to stand up and say, 'Look this is tough work,'" he said. "[Monsoon admits] we have screwed up projects and learned from it [and we know how to keep these problems from happening again]." He does not agree with a pervasive sense of denial emanating from within the indUStry and believes that, if anything, admitting to the challenges will show clients that a company is willing to tackle and overcome them. Sood is very outspoken about the outsourcing industry. In addition to Doubtsourcing, he also has a blog called "Outsourcing 2.0" about offshore development, and writes and speaks frequently on the topic. His biggest pet peeve is the use of the "flat world" metaphor, as coined by author Thomas Friedman in his book "The World is Flat." Sood believes it is time to retire the overused metaphor. In fact the tagline for Doubtsourcing is "the comic for a round world." "The world is not flat," Sood said. "It has curves and lumps and is, as a whole still round." According to Sood, the flat-world metaphor is about capability and the fact that now information work can happen anywhere, due to communication technology, skilled labor and cost incentive - but when it comes to quality of work the world is not flat. If it was, he explained, the customer support experience would be the same whether the call center operator lives in California or India or Costa Rica. "If it's flat, Chinese products would have the same quality standards that American ones do. In a flat world, 50 percent of offshore IT projects wouldn't fail due to communication and quality issues," Sood writes. "The world is full of strange curves and contours. All this 'flat world' talk tends to gloss over the cultural differences, language barriers … management challenges, time differences, etc., that global collaboration brings up." "When we accept that the world is still round, we can have a better conversation about these challenges, deal with the management issues and work harder on bridging cultural understanding," he continues. Sood believes that the flat-world metaphor has become so influential in how people think about outsourcing that they forget about these challenges and assume that everything will just work out. He said India is a perfect example of this and has fallen into the trap of "overpromising" when in reality much of the outsourcing work is of poor quality. "I think it is the natural time for these companies, and our company, to step back and figure if we are over-promising, to figure out if we are really delivering and, if we are not, is this hurting the overall brand of India," he said. "Whenever companies complain about the quality of work, Indian companies say, 'Look, we have this certification and that certification,'" he added. "When you look under the hood, we have been really great at certifying the mediocre quality [but this has to stop]." Sood does not doubt that his criticism, veiled in comedy or not, may not be well received by all - including by potential customers - but he is committed to his approach to marketing Monsoon. "There is a lack of humor regarding outsourcing. There is zero creative marketing in the industry," he said. "If no one else is doing it and they are afraid to do it, then we have a chance to do it and make a name for ourselves." His company has nowhere near tapped the marketshare that India would provide with its billion people, 1,652 languages, and immense numbers of literate, technical graduates pouring out of universities - yet it lags behind its major competitor, China, due to poor infrastructure and incomprehensibly complex bureaucracy. According to a team of HP engineers from Bangalore, over to meet U.K. journalists in Bristol as part of the celebrations around HP Labs' 40th birthday, technology can help, but only if everyone can interact with it. Only around 10 percent of Indians can conduct a transaction in English, which has limited the penetration of PCs to around 60 million. There's no further chance of growth unless that particular problem is solved, the Bangalore team claims. Voice recognition and continuous handwriting recognition have both been tried, but neither is reliable enough for daily use in the community. Instead, HP India has developed the Gesture Keyboard, or GKB, a digitiser pad and stylus combo that works with Indic writing, one of the major families of local language. This includes Urdu, Gujarati and Hindi - there are 400 million Hindi speakers alone, an enormous group to isolate from IT or, if you prefer, an enormous new market more numerous than the European Union. The key characteristic of this way of writing is that it has a number of base characters in an alphabet, but each may have one of a large set of vowel modifiers - matras - added. For example, Hindi has 36 consonants that can be modified by any of 12 matras, and almost every consonant can be bound to another. That leads to around 1,500 symbols. Trying to input these on an ordinary QWERTY-style keyboard results in huge numbers of keystrokes. Even expert typists find it difficult to master: someone with no exposure to technology can find it alien indeed. The GKB reflects the way the script actually works. You take the stylus and tap one of the base characters from the set printed onto the tablet, and that enters the character. Or, draw the matra over the character on the tablet: the underlying gesture recognition software in the product then combines the modifier with the base character to produce the right result. HP says that because this is very similar to the way writing is taught in schools, it takes around twenty minutes to pick up and can soon produce around twenty words a minute. Although the device is relatively expensive - it costs around 40 euros, in a country where a PC can be bought for 200 - HP says it can easily double the income of a cybercafe or kiosk, one of the burgeoning one-man band computer booths that give non-computer owners access to the Internet, government services and so on. It might also be built into keyboards, either by replacing the numeric keypad or by sliding out from beneath. The GKB is currently available in Hindi and Kannada, the language of the province of HP Labs India, with other versions such as Persian and Arabic in the labs. It takes about a month to add a new language, providing it follows the same basic rules; the project itself took a year to produce, building on four years of work in general purpose handwriting recognition. PrintCast is another example of technology being adapted to specific needs. This is a way of embedding documents and other data types in video broadcasts: in principle, nothing too different to the way Teletext and other systems have been sending information in TV signals since the 1970s, although PrintCast also understands digital transmissions. But by focusing on printable documents, PrintCast can massively improve retention of the information in the broadcast - very important in areas where access otherwise is limited. There are already plenty of satellite and terrestrial broadcast systems in India - the inventiveness comes in making them double as carriers of printed matter without modification. The new information is mixed in with the program before transmission, and a separate decoder monitors the video signal at the receiver and copies the documents into a buffer, from which it can be printed. The system is designed to be used in public forums: people come in to a hall to watch the broadcast, and at each point where a document can be printed, the person running the equipment can run off as many copies as needed, usually for a nominal charge. The advantages for health, agriculture and other local government information transmissions are huge, not least because in many areas other printed material distributed from central government is held up or not distributed at all - documents that tell people their rights are not always popular. This bypasses huge swathes of bureaucracy. Neither of these two inventions use breakthrough technologies - in principle, either could have been built ten or fifteen years ago with small teams of engineers working with modest resources. Indeed, at the HP Labs Bristol demonstration, a number of journalists were disparaging about the systems - "So, you've plugged a printer into a television. So what?" But like all inventions, no matter how obvious, it took someone who knew of a particular need to make them happen - and their importance has little to do with the mechanics behind them. The needs of the invisible world, the three billion outside the rich countries, are only just becoming known - as evidenced by HP Labs, which took 36 years to set up an Indian operation, and still got there ahead of most. With that, the company is betting that by meeting the country's needs the benefits will flow both ways. It's not just a matter of opening up another market, albeit one as big as any we've known before. By connecting these people, their ideas, capabilities and potential can flow back, bringing the U.S. new information and perspectives that can only help the innovation on which the industry depends. The 496 million Hindi speakers, and the hundreds of millions on the subcontinent who speak Bengali, Urdu and other Indian languages, would like to make computers their own. But their problems start at the keyboard, since there is a big difference between Indian-languages and English when it comes to reading and writing on computers. Keyboards designed for the English language alphabet must be adapted, with special software, so that their keys can produce Indian texts. This software constructs Indian language characters out of smaller pieces known as glyphs. For example, the South Indian Kannada language pieces together 142 glyphs in thousands of combinations to produce words based on Kannada's 49 characters. Computers In defining global standards for computing, the special needs of less influential nations seem to get sidetracked. To complicate matters, early researchers working on this issue in India constructed their own sets of glyphs or character pieces. This often meant that text composed on one computer could not be read on another loaded with rival software. This was a great handicap since it is the ability of computers to talk to one another that makes them such powerful tools. As computing spreads across India, these language-based digital divisions persist even today. Recently, the South Indian states of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu pushed ahead with standards of their own. And small firms like Mithi in the central Indian city of Pune have worked out their own solution to send and receive e-mail in 11 Indian languages besides English. Free alternatives Most of the current Indian language programs have been developed for use with Microsoft's Windows operating system. But many computer users in the region are pushing for free software alternatives that everyone can afford. At the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology and the National Centre of Software Technology, Tamil and Hindi language systems have been developed for Chennai and Bombay. Both rely on the Linux operating system which is freely available on the internet. Now that these breakthroughs have been achieved there's real hope among the 90% of Indians who do not read and write in English that the digital language divide will soon be bridged. Similar to English as a Second Language Students learning English as a second language (ESL) in the U.S. There are many oddities that seem like nonsense to writers whose first language originates anywhere from the Far East to Africa or the Middle East and does not use such weird words as 'a' 'an' or 'the', or 'helping' verbs, or doesn't always place adjectives before the nouns as English does. If English confuses you, you are a normal ESL student. These "weird" things-such as countless forms of the verb 'to be', prepositions like 'in' 'into' or 'of', or the articles 'a', 'an', and 'the'-are not learned easily because there are long lists of examples and many exceptions. No grammar book can offer complete guidance. ESL students also often need help with other oddities of English that primarily are based on the cultures of the U.K. and the U.S. These are called "idioms," of which there are many! One place to start exploring the difficulties of Indian professionals reading and writing English well enough to please U.S. law firms is verbs. Unlike the Indian dialects, English includes helping verbs that are used with main verbs. Helping verbs combine with other verbs to form all of the tenses except the simple present and simple past. The following chart shows the forms of major helping verbs: 'Be'. This is found in the following forms: 'be' 'am' 'is' 'are' 'was' 'were' + (and often takes an 'ing' form: I am going. With modal first:I may be going. Passive (with past participle):I was given the title. 'Have'. This can be seen as 'have' 'has' 'had' I have started. He had started. Do. This verb often looks like the following: 'do' 'does' 'did' + (plus the verb's base form) Did she buy that? Modal verbs are "helping" verbs with a variety of meanings. After a modal "helper," use the base form of the verb. Examples of "helping" verbs: Can, may, and must. Example sentences: Permission: May I take this? (Is it all right if I take this?) Advisability: I ought to take this. (It's a good idea to take this.) Conditional verbs: In conditional sentences, clauses after 'if', 'when', and 'unless' show whether the result is possible or real, depending on other circumstances. Prediction: Predicts something that is based on some condition or previous action. Present or Previous Action, Future (usually modal + base form) If you eat more fresh fruit, you will be healthier. Unless she arrives soon, we will be late for the concert. HINT: When 'would', 'could', and 'might' are used with the base form,'-s' is not added to the base form for third person singular present. For example: If he had a car, he could drive [not 'could drives'] us to the restaurant. Two-Word (Phrasal) Verbs Two-word (phrasal) verbs have two (or sometimes three) words (particles) following the verb that help to indicate the meaning. Becaus the additional word or words often change the meaning, these verbs are called 'idioms' (or unique or 'nonsense' words that come from a country's culture). Look over (examine) She looked over the terms of the contract. Look up (search) I need to look up that phone number. Verbs with '-ing' and 'to + Verb' Forms Some verbs combine only with the '-ing' form of the verb (gerund); some combine only with the 'to+verb' form (infinitive); some verbs can be followed by either form. Verbs followed only by '-ing' forms (gerunds): admit enjoy practice; appreciate finish recall. Some verbs that can be followed by either form can have their meaning changed: forget remember stop try; She stopped talking. [She ceased and did not talk.]; She stopped to talk. [She paused while going somewhere in order to talk.] Verbs Verbs are necessary parts of English sentences and must be included. Verbs such as 'is'/'are' or other 'helping verbs' can be omitted in other languages, but not in English. --Liu 'is' studying to be a computer programmer. --She 'has' been studying ancient Mayan ruins in Mexico for many summers -- It 'might' be a good idea to bring some water when we hike. Subjects and There/It In some languages, the subject can be omitted, but in English the subject is left out only when expressing a command ("Put that box here, please.") All the children laughed when 'they' (subject) were watching the cartoon. The hockey player 'who' (subject) was guarding the goal got hurt in the game. Particularly troublesome are THERE and IT as subjects. Even when THERE is the subject word and the real subject is elsewhere in the sentence, THERE must be included. IT is sometimes needed as a subject in sentences about the weather, distance, time, and other aspects of the world around us. Repeated Words: Subjects In some languages, the subject can be repeated as a pronoun before the verb. In English, the subject is included only once. Bones in the body [do NOT need the word 'they' next] become brittle when people grow older. [In this sentence, both BONES and THEY are the subject of the verb brittle.] The plane that was ready for takeoff [do NOT need 'it' at this point] stopped on the runway. [In this sentence both plane and it are the subject of the verb stopped.] Conclusion Those examples directly above are just a few nuances of American English that Indian business people and writers often don't understand until years of ongoing, direct usage with Americans within a business deal or negotiation. The language problems so far have been solved by having American copy editors work on or rewrite text provided by Indian lawyers to assure that meanings haven't been changed. This is a hidden cost, that another step-with its added costs-will be necessary on this side of the oceans after years of bragging by Indian LPOs that they are all fluent in English. In fact, I've had to heavily edit many of their articles and send them back to India, and I've had great misunderstandings with their assignment editors because their emails are unreadable: they obviously look up an Indian word in a dictionary and find the English word and then paste it within the email, or, worse, within their site or blog. |
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