Legal Work Outsourced to India

I am among thousands of attorneys who believe unionization is the only way to change the unconscionable exploitation by the employment agencies and their law firm clients upon whom we depend for work. Some of us depend on this work because of the six figure law school debt incurred because the mid- and lower-rated law schools misrepresent both the employment opportunities and the income that can be earned in the market. As a result, the market is being flooded with graduates whose only employment opportunity is temporary work, namely, document review, offered through agencies which are widely suspected of engaging in a variety of illegal anti-worker practices.

Others of us are over 50 years old and out of work as the result of layoffs and downsizing. Because of our age, we are unemployable and depend on agencies for document review work. My experience demonstrates that age only adds to the extreme difficulty in obtaining even a temporary assignment — all of which, by the way, are low-paying and benefit-free.

Now, in addition to the foregoing, our cheap document review jobs (which the law firms are already marking up by 200+%) are being sent to India. As an attorney admitted in New York, I cannot even get a job in New Jersey — so how is it that my potential job can be sent to India? It is time to organize and stop this madness.

For those who don’t know, only a small fraction of attorneys earn the “big bucks.” The big money is “earned” (more accurately “made” or “stolen”) on Wall Street, not in the vast majority of law firms. The rest of us — 90% or so — are struggling just to keep our heads above water and maintain even one foot in the middle class, i.e, pay for the roof over our head and buy health insurance out of pocket. This situation is undoubtedly not confined to the legal sector and is unsustainable. It is time — past time — to organize, unionize, compel our bar associations to side with us, and put an end to this insanity.

Tags: document-review, downsizing, layoffs, outsourcing, temporary-legal-work

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 27th, 2007 at 11:03 am and is filed under Our stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.