Cabinets are also available to customers that would like ability to lock their equipment, have more then ten servers they wish to fit in a single housing or for isolation purposes.

shoes made. He insists workmanship can't be matched in United States, nor can price. "These are

the most comfortable shoes I've ever worn," he said of a pair of leather loafers he had on recently.

Steinberg, who was standing in his office in Noida, a high-tech suburb of New Delhi, is not in shoe

business. He believes he's found another product that can be made in India at high quality and low cost: legal

services. His 1 1/2-year-old company, Intellevate, specializes in intellectual property work. Its staff, about

one-fifth of them lawyers, prepares patent applications and conducts technical research on intellectual

property questions. Among its clients are legal departments of Fortune 500 companies.

The market for outsourced legal work is expected to reach $163 billion by next year, and India is positioned

to seize largest share. The time difference between India and United States allows for work to be done

overnight, and many people in India's enormous workforce are college-educated and English-speaking.

Intellevate recently placed a want ad for a patent researcher in Times of India, leading

English-language daily. The company received 1,700 résumés. "There are 200 million English-speaking,

college-educated Indians and there are not 200 million jobs," Steinberg said. Such a disparity in supply and

demand allows his company to hire credentialed, capable labor, cheaply. "We're not selling shoes," Steinberg

likes to say. "We're selling cobblers."

Puneet Mohey, president of a legal outsourcing company called Lexadigm on other side of town, has a more

straightforward pitch: "We provide large-law-firm-quality work at literally one-third price." Lexadigm's

rates range from $65 to $95 an hour for work that large U.S. firms might bill at $250 an hour or more. Nearly

all employees at Mohey's company are lawyers.

With outsourcing, those who are not members of an American bar are supervised, and their work vouched for, by

someone who is. "To extent that what you have them do is legal research for U.S. firms, it's not much

different than having law students do it," said George Washington University Law School professor Thomas

Morgan, a scholar of professional responsibility.

Some of dozen or so outsourcing companies that have sprung up over last decade in India focus on

low-level paralegal work—keeping track of filing dates and document reviews. But Intellevate and Lexadigm

prefer to take on more sophisticated work like patent applications and appellate briefs because work

commands higher rates from clients. Lexadigm recently drafted its first brief for a U.S. Supreme Court case,

involving application to a tax dispute of Fifth Amendment's due process clause. The brief will

ultimately be filed by an American law firm, which can use all, part, or none of Lexadigm's work—the same as

if draft had been written by one of its own associates.

With work being done in India becoming more sophisticated, some American attorneys are skeptical of

American firms that use outsourced legal services. "I think a lawyer has a responsibility over his work and he

just can't delegate it," said former ABA president Jerome Shestack, now head of litigation at

Philadelphia firm of Wolf, Block, Schorr and Solis-Cohen. "The problem with outsourcing is, how do you keep

control over it? How do you see how it's being done?"

OUTSOURCING LEGAL WORK TO INDIA began in 1995, when 34-lawyer, Dallas-based litigation firm of Bickel &

Brewer opened an office in Hyderabad. Co-founder and co-managing partner Bill Brewer, who is 53 years old,

explained that idea was hatched when he was out to brunch with a relation by marriage. The relative, C. S.

Prasada Rao, was originally from India. "We were looking for new ways to be more efficient in handling

millions of pieces of information that confront us in each case. I'm not sure how it came out of

conversation but somewhere a light went off. I asked, 'You can have a lawyer for how much an hour in India?'

He said, 'Two dollars an hour.' We didn't make it to dinner before we were setting up subsidiary in

India."

Bickel & Brewer has since spun off its Hyderabad office, run by Rao, into a separate company called Imaging &

Abstract International, which handles work for Bickel & Brewer as well as other American clients. In 2001,

General Electric added a legal division to a currently existing base of operations in India to handle legal

compliance and research for two of its divisions, GE Plastics and GE Consumer Finance.