Outsourcing Legal Work and the Practice of Law
The American Bar Association has consistently recognized that providing legal research to attorneys is not the same as practicing law:
A lawyer can employ lay secretaries, lay investigators, lay detectives, lay researchers, accountants, lay scriveners, nonlawyer draftsmen or nonlawyer researchers. In fact, he may employ nonlawyers to do any task for him except counsel clients about law matters, engage directly in the practice of law, appear in court or appear in formal proceedings that are part of the judicial process, so long as it is he who takes the work and vouches for it to the client and becomes responsible for it to the client. In other words, we do not limit the kind of assistants the lawyer can acquire in any way to persons who are admitted to the Bar, so long as the nonlawyers do not do things that lawyers may not do or do the things that lawyers only may do.
ABA Comm. on Ethics and Prof’l Responsibility, Formal Op. 316 (1967). See also ABA Comm. on Ethics and Prof’l Responsibility, Informal Op. 1437 (1979) (considering and upholding “the propriety of publicizing a lawyer’s use of assistants drawn from other disciplines. The Model Code contains no prohibition against the use of such assistants by a lawyer.”).
More recently, the ABA has explicitly acknowledged the profound benefits of legal outsourcing to the American legal profession:
Many lawyers engage other lawyers or nonlawyers, as independent contractors, directly or through intermediaries, on a temporary or an ongoing basis, to provide various legal and nonlegal support services. Outsourced tasks range from the use of a local photocopy shop for the reproduction of documents, to the retention of a document management company for the creation and maintenance of a database for complex litigation, to the use of a third-party vendor to provide and maintain a law firm’s computer system, to the hiring of a legal research service to prepare a 50-state survey of the law on an issue of importance to a client, or even to the engagement of a group of foreign lawyers to draft patent applications or develop legal strategies and prepare motion papers in U.S. litigation.
The outsourcing trend is a salutary one for our globalized economy. Labor costs vary greatly across the United States and throughout the rest of the world. Outsourcing affords lawyers the ability to reduce their costs and often the cost to the client to the extent that the individuals or entities providing the outsourced services can do so at lower rates than the lawyer’s own staff. In addition, the availability of lawyers and nonlawyers to perform discrete tasks may, in some circumstances, allow for the provision of labor-intensive legal services by lawyers who do not otherwise maintain the needed human resources on an ongoing basis. A small firm might not regularly employ the lawyers and legal assistants required to handle a large, discovery-intensive litigation effectively. Outsourcing, however, can enable that firm to represent a client in such a matter effectively and efficiently, by engaging additional lawyers to conduct depositions or to review and analyze documents, together with a temporary staff of legal assistants to provide infrastructural support.
There is nothing unethical about a lawyer outsourcing legal and nonlegal services, provided the outsourcing lawyer renders legal services to the client with the “legal knowledge, skill, thoroughness and preparation reasonably necessary for the representation[.]”
ABA Comm. on Ethics and Prof’l Responsibility, Formal Op. 08-451 (2008).