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Edited on Tue Jan-27-04 06:57 PM by dpibel
Edited to add one "s"
There's very little business law that requires physical presence. In fact, it would be unproblematic to handle litigation using offshore counsel -- a video hookup would work just fine. Even if it didn't have the imprimatur of the official legal system, parties are free to contract to any kind of dispute resolution they like.
Businesses pay a nice bit of change to their lawyers. These days, when the bottom line is everything, changing from a NYC lawyer who charges a grand an hour to one in Bangalore, who speaks perfect English and has an equivalent education, but charges $50 is gonna be real tempting for the cut-to-the bone CEOs.
Just so no one will miss my deathless insights, here's a rerun of what I said on the thread that this is a dupe of:
The elite servant class -- lawyers, who make comfortable money serving the interests of the rich, for instance -- have not cared about jobs going overseas so long as they were the jobs of insignificant proles.
When outsourcing/globalization starts to threaten their jobs, that's a completely different matter. And these are people accustomed to wielding a secondary level of power. They're also far more politically savvy than your average outsourced textile worker.
Thing are likely to heat up a bit with white-collar outsourcing.
Not to hijack your thread, but a word to the lawyer bashers: Those evil, ambulance-chasing plaintiff's attorneys that you love to hate are a tiny minority. The overwhelming majority of attorneys (and of rich attorneys) are the ones who spend their lives figuring out how to help one business stick it to another business. They're the ones with the real political power, because they have corporate money behind them.
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