Indian law firms can potentially earn up to $4.7 billion in revenues by 2011, by leveraging the offshore legal-process outsourcing model to provide legal and paralegal services to U.S. law firms and corporations, Indian news agency, Press Trust of India (PTI), said quoting a new research report.

The Indian firms must tap U.S. mid-sized or large law firms in the first phase before they target corporations, according to a research report published by Crisil Research, a research arm of Indian stock-rating agency Crisil. U.S.- and U.K-based law firms like Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy, Baker & McKenzie, Allen & Overy, Schwegman, Lundberg, Woessner and Kluth, Kelley Drye & Warren, Eversheds, Hammonds Direct and Bickel & Brewer are some of the law firms who have offshored to India. The outsourcing service providers would need to add 33,000 lawyers to achieve this revenue, predicts the report.

In a study of the state of the legal-process offshoring industry, Legal Services — The Mass Piloting Stage, in May 2006, Global Services estimated the total size of the legal offshore services industry in India to be of $60-$70 million, employing about 1200 people. The report concluded that while as many as 200 odd law firms are trying out the model only a handful of them, numbering less than 5-6, have significant scale of operations.

For a list of the major service providers, follow this link