In the early 2000s, I got a call from a colleague to discuss an idea someone had pitched to him: taking high-volume, repetitive legal work to India in order to take advantage of the fact that, like in the U.S., Indian laws are based on English common law and that Indian lawyers charge much lower rates than their American counterparts. “Outstanding idea,” I recall saying. “But it’ll never fly.”
Around the same time, Skadden attorney Ram Vasudevan had the same idea. Only Vasudevan was better able to see the future, so on April Fool’s Day in 2004, he launched QuisLex, one of the very first legal process outsourcers. On the company’s 10th anniversary, Ram and I sat down to discuss how the legal industry has changed, specifically how technology has been spurred by and resulted from those changes.
