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My Progress and an Outsourcing Rant

Things are looking up on the job front, though I dare not be too optimistic:

-Investigating and interviewing for a couple of temporary jobs to pay the bills
-Heading back to Philly for a permanent interview at a firm (please send good karma my way on Tuesday!)
-MAY be interviewing at a very prestigious firm in Boston. Though I told some friends the story about how I apparently snagged an interview (though it's far from finalized yet), I think I'll save that one when I'm safely employed. Yes, I am a tease. But I desperately want to find work.

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My last post about posting my resume on craigslist and offering to work for free? I tried it, as an experiment, to see if I got any response from gutter firms looking for cheap labor. I got one email from a small place in Newburyport and the rest was spam for fly-by-night IT companies, so not exactly the damning results I wanted and hoped for.

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In more characteristically pessimistic news is this article chronicling the new trend in outsourcing document review and other contract legal work to India, putting American lawyers out of work courtesy of wonderful individuals* like David Perla (a UPenn undergrad AND J.D., ahem), who lists his industry as Outsourcing/Offshoring:

"The only lawyers who work for staffing agencies, said Perla, 'are the ones who couldn't make it as real lawyers.'

In his view, the temporary lawyers typically hired to perform document review on major litigation have minimal skills and zero motivation. In contrast, Pangea3 can attract the best and the brightest young lawyers in India, fluent in English and trained in English common law. Perla said clients have held "bake-offs" in which the Pangea3's Indian lawyers were asked to perform the same tasks as U.S. contract lawyers. He said the Indians soundly trounced the Americans."

First of all, this is patently untrue. I haven't had THE CHANCE to practice as a lawyer because the market is so saturated with J.D.s. Ask a Penn Law grad, and he'll spout all sunshine and roses about the job market. Yes, this is from personal experience. For the rest of us not from the "Ivy" law schools, prospects are bleak for those outside the top 10%. Does that mean I have "zero motivation" and "minimal skills"? Of course not.

I dare Mr. Perla to walk into a contract review and say that to young attorneys' faces. (Though apparently, according to one friend, one partner doesn't hesitate to overtly and openly refer to his temps as "scum." Lovely.) Tell these folks who spent tens of thousands (sometimes more) on their legal education and suffered through a forced curve that he didn't have the pleasure of experiencing at Penn, (oh, land of the default A-/B+), that they just don't cut it because they're unskilled and lazy. Because obviously all of them fit into that little mold that you've crafted for them.

I suppose I could craft a similar mold for Mr. Perla. The greedy, entrepreneur who views himself as superior to most of his own colleagues and uses it as a justification for shipping American jobs overseas to be performed cheaply for his own profit. See, it's just that easy. In return, he might retaliate by calling me the jealous, unemployed Tier 2 grad with a dim future as a "real lawyer". And on it goes.

As it is, all the document reviews in my area require a) bar admission (I'm still waiting) and b) experience. One needs to falsify one's resume to include experience for these "minimal skills" jobs of which Mr. Perla writes, even after attending three years of classes that purportedly train a professional to enter the legal field and passing a minimum skills competency test (the bar exam). However, Indian legal professionals can perform these better than me? If so, the state of our legal education is indeed in jeopardy. Perhaps Mr. Perla would like to work toward remedying our country's problem? But where's the tidy profit in that?

*Rife with sarcasm, as intended.

Full post as published by Wicked Words on January 23, 2008 (boomark / email).