Michelle Vega spent more than six years as a litigation associate at Kelley Drye & Warren in New York before leaving the firm to care for a sick relative. When Vega started looking for a job a year later, she wanted to take her skills in a new direction.
A friend at a legal staffing company told her about an opening that offered management experience outside the law firm environment, but required a one-year stint in India. Vega was immediately intrigued and asked the friend to submit her résumé. When outsourcing company Mindcrest Inc. offered Vega a senior manager job in May 2008, she accepted and moved her life to Pune, India, by month's end.
"I like to travel and have always been interested in the world outside New York," said the 35-year-old Brooklyn native, who is still living in Pune. "I wanted to be able to use my legal skills and training, but was not necessarily interested in practicing anymore."
Although some U.S. lawyers view outsourcing to India with dread -- particularly vulnerable contract attorneys doing document review -- for a lucky few, India offers an opportunity to get management experience, more client contact and a stake in a growing area of the legal business, not to mention a travel adventure. Companies that aid law firms and law departments in outsourcing legal work to India, including Mindcrest, Pangea3 LLC and SDD Global Solutions Pvt. Ltd., are recruiting lawyers with U.S. professional experience to train and supervise their expanding work forces in India. So, while India may be sapping some work from the United States, it's giving back a little now.
The companies are hiring as many as 24 U.S. lawyers during the next year to manage English-speaking Indian professionals who perform legal tasks at a fraction of U.S. rates. The Indian lawyers do everything from patent prosecution work to document review to litigation preparation to legal research for law firms that include Kirkland & Ellis and companies such as General Electric Co. The recession has not only stoked client interest in the lower-cost option, with rates of about $25 to $100 an hour, but it has also made hiring U.S. lawyers more affordable, the companies' executives said.
"Increasingly, we are finding lawyers in the U.S. willing to go and work in India," said Ganesh Natarajan, the Mumbai, India-born and U.S.-educated attorney who is the Chicago-based chief executive of Mindcrest.
'THE RIGHT INTANGIBLES'
Natarajan, who founded the company in 2001, said he's seeking lawyers who show a maturity in dealing with people and can create processes that are clear to workers and clients alike. He also wants people with "the right intangibles," such as a sensitivity to working through cultural differences and adapting to a less advanced country.
"It's not as easy on a day-in, day-out basis as it is here," Natarajan said. "You need someone who can roll with the punches a little bit."
Mindcrest, which has 680 Indian employees and three U.S. lawyers in India, wants to hire 10 more during the next year, Natarajan said.
"The level of growth just warrants more U.S. attorneys in India today," said Sanjay Kamlani, a co-chief executive officer of Pangea3 who was born in Miami to Indian parents and lived in New York until moving his family to Mumbai in 2005.
Pangea3, which has 300 employees overall and five U.S. lawyers in India, plans to hire five more U.S. attorneys during the next year and perhaps more, depending on how quickly it integrates the new hires and expands business, said New York-based co-CEO David Perla, who met Kamlani at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
SDD Global, which has 26 employees, may hire as many as nine U.S. lawyers during the next year as it builds its overall work force to 100, said Russell Smith, the company's president and its only U.S. lawyer at the Mysore, India, operations. He founded the company in January 2006 after traveling to India in 2004 and falling in love with it, he said.
The legal outsourcing market, now more than a decade old, took in $225 million in revenue last year from U.S. and European entities sending less than 5 percent of the industry's legal work abroad, according the to Indian company ValueNotes Database Pvt. Ltd. That leaves room for the industry to grow, but some law firms and companies still have concerns about data security and work quality, the research company said in a May report.
As a senior manager at Mindcrest, Vega oversees the work of about 450 employees through 25 direct reports. Her work ranges from researching briefs in support of motions to drafting discovery requests to responding to subpoenas.
Vega, who graduated from Touro College Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center, said she enjoys using her litigation knowledge to guide the young Indian attorneys who do the company's legal research, document review and contract management work. Training Indian employees often means putting things in context for them. For instance, she might have to explain the relative value of a building on Park Avenue in New York by comparing it to an upscale street in Mumbai, Vega said.
She has been surprised that Pune has all the amenities she needs plus restaurants, theaters and shopping malls. A Hard Rock Cafe has even opened in the town. Nonetheless, it's still India, with elephants and cows walking in the streets, she said.
Vega declined to specify her salary, but said it's commensurate with what she might be making in the United States if one adjusts for the much lower cost of living in India.
Mindcrest's U.S. lawyers in India are paid between $125,000 and $200,000 annually, depending on their experience, Natarajan said. By contrast, the Indian lawyers earn between $30,000 and $65,000.
"The idea is to be able to practice high-quality law in a way that makes it not break the banks of our clients," said Smith, whose U.S. lawyers in India make between $60,000 and $100,000. "We could never pay what a successful partner at a big or midsized firm makes."
What the companies can't offer in dollars, they try to make up for by providing management experience, equity stakes or stock options and the opportunity to be part of an entrepreneurial endeavor in a growing sector of the legal industry.
Attorney Karla Bookman grew up in Miami, graduated from Columbia Law School and worked for Kasowitz, Benson, Torres & Friedman in New York before leaving to follow her husband's job to India in November. Shortly after arriving, Bookman, 28, landed a job as director of litigation services for Pangea3.
She works in Pangea3's legal research department, communicating with clients about what they want and checking the quality of legal research before it's sent to them.
"I get a lot more direct contact with clients than I would have in a U.S. law firm setting," Bookman said.
She also trains Indian employees on legal research, memo writing and topics foreign to them, such as the American jury system.
"As a second-year associate, I definitely didn't get to manage that many people," Bookman said.
BUYING AMERICAN
The recession has made hiring U.S. lawyers more feasible because compensation levels have come down with law firm salary reductions and an expanded pool of unemployed lawyers, the companies' executives said.
There's "a supply of very talented people coming back on the market," Perla said. "You've got people who have managed and run significant e-discovery projects in the United States."
Pangea3 last month hired Stefanie Morgan, who left Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy's New York office when the firm dismantled the document-review group for which she was a staff attorney manager, she said. She didn't go looking for a post in India, but a recruiting call from Perla persuaded her that the job offered the challenge of higher-level management as well as a chance to travel.
Morgan, 39, plans to keep living in New Jersey for at least two years until her daughter graduates from high school, but will split her time between the United States and the company's Mumbai office and may ultimately move to India, she said.
It's the perfect base from which to see Asia, Bookman said. She's already traveled to Goa, Jaipur and around the Rajasthani countryside. Vega has journeyed to the state of Kerala at the southern tip of India, Goa, Delhi and Agra to see the Taj Mahal.
"If you want to see something completely different from your little part of the world," Vega said, "India is really the place to come."
