Ethics

Cassandra Burke Robertson's latest article, A Collaborative Model of Offshore Legal Outsourcing, is now available here on SSRN.  Cassandra is an Associate Professor of Law at Case Western Reserve University School of Law, where she writes and teaches in the areas of civil procedure and professional responsibility.  She is particularly interested in how institutional and organizational dynamics affect the practice of law, especially as legal practice becomes more globalized, and this article fits within that framework.  The article is forthcoming in Arizona State Law Journal.  (And we had the pleasure of hosting her here in East Lansing this fall when she presented the article at the inaugural Michigan State University College of Law Junior Faculty Workshop!)

Here is the abstract:

International outsourcing has come to the legal profession. The ABA and other bar associations have given it their stamp of approval, and an ailing economy has pushed both clients and firms to consider sending more legal work abroad. This article integrates research from the fields of organizational behavior, social psychology, and economic theory to analyze the effectiveness of the legal outsourcing relationship. It identifies organizational pressures in the practice of law that affect how legal work is performed in a transnational context, and it examines how individuals on both sides of the outsourcing process influence the success or failure of a globalized practice. Ultimately, the article recommends that parties involved in legal offshoring should move away from a model of disaggregation and toward a model of collaboration. Unlike a disaggregation model that assumes outsourcing vendors will autonomously complete discrete legal tasks, a collaborative model would explicitly focus on cooperation, communication, and renegotiation of status and resources.