Alok Aggarwal
Evalueserve, Chairman & Co-Founder, Saratoga, CA

Saragota, California, April 2010: The economic recession (the Great Recession) of 2008 and 2009 resulted in a sharp drop in international trade, impacting the entire global economy. Recent studies by BTI Consulting Group and Hildebrandt-Citi Private Bank reported that 2008 and 2009 were among the worst years for the legal market in the United States during the last 50 years with billable rates and realized rates dropping by almost 10 percent (after including inflation). On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean too, the Great Recession took its toll; the Clementi proposals in the United Kingdom are further expected to change the way the law firms operate, forcing them to become more efficient and competitive.

In January 2006, Evalueserve, a global research and analytics firm, conducted a study on the state of the Legal Process Offshore outsourcing (LPO) industry, forecasting the industry’s revenue and growth potential in its whitepaper titled “Legal Process Outsourcing – Hype vs. Reality.” The present article builds on this study and analyses the current landscape and the potential of the LPO industry, especially in light of the recent developments mentioned above. The key findings of the present study are as follows: