Deskilling a society

Is outsourcing destroying our supply of skilled workers?

Old abandoned machinery

The Economist looks at outsourcing in the legal profession and how various services are now being offered claiming to cut lawyers’ bills by up to 80%.

All of this is valid as legal costs have escalated to the point that governments and businesses are baulking at the sheer expense of lawyers’ services.

There is though another aspect to this issue; is this another step in de-skilling our society?

A key point in the article is “…plenty of legal jobs are routine. American law firms typically get fresh law graduates to do such grunt work…”. While that grunt was profitable – as The Economist points out law firms would “bill clients for it at steep rates” – it is also how young lawyers are trained.

The article observes that Thompson Reuters recently bought Pangea3, a legal outsourcing firm with most of its lawyers in Mumbai, while announcing it is looking to sell BarBri, a company that prepares US graduates for bar examinations, which leads to the conclusion that training young American lawyers is not a good business proposition as selling the services of cheaper Indian lawyers.

Neglecting the training of young workers has been a notable point of Western economies in the last 30 years and while we can argue that fewer lawyers may not be a bad thing for these societies, the problems of not training nurses, electricians, builders, computer programmers, call centre staff and Engineering workers is now becoming a problem as we’ve find the global competition for skilled workers is intensifying.

There’s no easy answer to this deskilling process as outsourcing and globalisation are a fact of life in the connected economy. But we need to be aware of this process so we can trim our national economic and education policies to suit the times.

It’s certainly clear that pumping out thousands of law students who’ve been promised lucrative careers checking commas in contracts for big corporations is a losing proposition, but what should we be training these folk for?

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Author: Paul Wallbank

Paul Wallbank is a speaker and writer charting how technology is changing society and business. Paul has four regular technology advice radio programs on ABC, a weekly column on the smartcompany.com.au website and has published seven books.

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