More on the Move of Legal Jobs to India

You may recall the last post about the outsourcing of legal jobs to India. Here's another post on that same theme this time by Larry Ribstein at Forbes in his op-ed Where Have All the Lawyers Gone? His concise and spot on summary of the situation can be found in this comment:

The days when associates fresh out of law school billed hundreds of dollars an hour to learn their trade have been ended by global competition for legal services. Clients once stayed with the same big law firm for generations because they needed the comfort of the brand. Then law firms got greedy and imagined their brand could justify billing out the time of associates in perpetuity. Clients got leaner and more cost-conscious, and their in-house legal departments became much more sophisticated consumers of legal services. Global transportation, communication and computing got cheap enough that legal projects did not have to be done in a single physical space.

Ribstein makes probably the most telling characterization of graduating law students to date when he calls them "canaries in the coal mine."