Indian lawyers need to pull up their socks. Legal process outsourcing (LPO) firms need them more than anytime before. Recent months have seen a significant increase in the demand of lawyers by these outsourcing firms in India, courtesy increased legal work from foreign clients and the restructuring of their offered services. LPOs like CPA Global, Pangea 3, Unitedlex, Infosys LPO arm are looking at almost doubling their headcount in the next 12 months.

Industry data reveals that the $440 million Indian LPO industry will see an upward swing after 2010 in terms of employee strength. The industry has by far been experiencing a flat growth in employee increase because of low end work being done from India. Moreover, law firms refrained from outsourcing their confidential work to vendors based in India.

Take the case for CPA Global, an LPO firm which has an India based headcount of 800, total employees being 1500 across all countries. �We will hire 400 lawyers in India by the end of this year. Our global headcount will be 7500 in five years. We expect 75% of it to be in India,� says Anand Sharma, CFO and head, management services at CPA Global. The company�s 40% hiring would constitute laterals with 12-15 years experience and the remaining 60% would be freshers. Sharma elaborates that presently CPA does three-fourth of its business in intellectual property and another one- fourth is litigation, contract management, legal research. �We want to have a ratio of 50: 50 by 2013-end. Thus, we are concentrating only on hiring lawyers . Presently the company has 1/3 rd lawyers out of 800,� he adds.