$150,000 In Debt and Your Job Just Got Outsourced.

CNN.coM is reporting that Lawyers may be the next industry outsourced to India. GE has a unit with 30 lawyers already. By 2015, says the article, 40,000 legal jobs may be overseas (compare to programmers of 210,000).

So will law school ever pay off?

Law school is one of the most expensive post graduate work, and along with 90 hour work weeks, completely justifies charging a client $400 an hour and $.35 a photocopy. Law school has also usually meant that as long as you got in and completed your course work, you would at least be able to have a job.

But now it seems even law isn't safe. Or is it?

The article reports that the biggest jobs being sent overseas will be low level researchers and junior lawyers.

There are few big problems with this. First, with no junior lawyers working in the United States, there will be no one to promote to Associate or Partner. Even though these people do a lot of work that an ape could do, they start building portfolios of clients and eventually will lead to their own partnership.

Second, researchers like paralegals don't cost law firms money, they cost the client money. Some people we know [and love], could explain to you how much profit they earn their company for each of their billable hours.

So we feel law students shouldn't be frightened yet. After all, even Russia has lawyers.