NEW YORK — Bruce Masterson, the chief operating officer of Socrates Media, asked his outside counsel to customize a residential lease for all 50 U.S. states in 2003. About $400,000 was the firm’s estimate. He rejected that cost and hired QuisLex, a firm in Hyderabad, India, that did the work for $45,000.

“It was good quality,” said Masterson, whose company, which is based in Chicago, publishes legal forms on the Internet. “We’ve been working together ever since.”

Clients are pushing law firms like Jones Day and Kirkland & Ellis to send basic legal tasks to India, where lawyers tag documents and investigate takeover targets for as little as $20 an hour. The firms are part of a trend that will move about 50,000 U.S. legal jobs overseas by 2015, according to Forrester Research in Boston.

“The objective is to have only the most valuable people in London or New York, and the others in India, China or Columbus, Ohio,” said Robert Profusek, co-head of the mergers and acquisitions practice at Jones Day in New York.

Profusek sends low-end work to the cheapest locations and plans to open a document center in India.

“Lawyers are service providers,” he said. “We are not gods.”

Companies with in-house legal departments in India include DuPont, Cisco Systems, and Morgan Stanley, according to ValueNotes Database, which is based in Maharashtra, India. Read more…

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