Nandita Vijay, Bangalore
An increasing number of global pharma companies are keen to increase the legal off-shoring business with India because of the huge cost advantage. When legal offshoring is out-sourced from India, global majors save up to 40-50 per cent.
The growth in the sector is primarily attributed to the similarity in the legal system with US and UK. There is huge availability of qualified personnel which includes graduates, engineers, 79,000 lawyers and 5,000 PhDs. Companies can save up to 40-50 per cent of the costs by getting the processes done in India vis-à-vis a high cost locations.
Organized Indian Vendors in the legal space have existed since '80s and have now gained lot of process maturity. The government of India has also given considerable thrust to legal off-shoring, Rishikesh Mandilwar, Director- Market Expansion, Zinnov Management Consulting Private Limited told Pharmabiz.
The legal offshoring sector in the country is estimated at $600 million. Currently, a large percentage of business from US and EU are being offloaded to India.
India is extremely cost competitive and global pharma companies are capitalizing on the low cost advantage of process efficiencies, he added.
Some of the notable service providers in India engaged in the pharma legal offshoring space includes Evalueserve, Nishith Desai, T & T Consultants, Remfry & Sagar and SciTech Patent Art. Emerging countries like China, South Africa and Mexico are competing with India for a share of the Legal Processing Outsourcing (LPO) market.
Offshoring assignments for the pharma sector began with legal transcription, coding, indexing, document review. Over the years complexity and value of legal work outsourced to India has been increasing. Currently, Indian service providers are offering high end services like legal research, intellectual property and litigation services including IPR (intellectual property right) litigation.
Pharmaceutical domain is expected to face increased cost pressure and global pharma multinational companies are likely to offshore assignments more across the value chain. This ensures promising future for the pharmaco-legal domain, said Mandilwar.
Currently due to global economic slowdown and recession, companies across the globe are looking to cut costs and offshore their legal activities to low cost destinations like India. Some of the Indian vendors in the legal outsourcing space have seen an increase in their revenues.
Despite the cost advantage for India and the interest indicated by the global pharma companies to offshore jobs from here, yet legal offshoring is yet to mature. This is because there is only small presence of large market players. It is also observed that the operations are of small scale for many companies. There is also a lack of conviction about data confidentiality and ability to handle higher complexity work, which are some of the other challenges in the pharma-legal off-shoring in the country, informed Mandilwar.
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