About a week ago, West, the best-known name in legal publishing in the U.S., began publicly ruminating about joining the stampede to India. For the past few months, West has been running a pilot program in Mumbai, India, where several Indian lawyers are preparing summaries of unpublished U.S. court decisions.

For those not in the legal biz, West is a unit of Canada's publishing behemoth, The Thomson Corporation. While many investors may also be unfamiliar with that name, Thomson is truly one of the 800-pound gorillas of the publishing world. Probably their best-known financial publishing unit, First Call, is quoted daily by Wall Street talking heads, rattling off consensus earnings expectations.

But as big as the company is in the financial world, financial publishing is only its third-largest business segment. The largest by far is its legal publishing arm, spearheaded by the twin on-line and off-line powerhouses Westlaw and West Publishing. Those two units, along with others such as RIA, Findlaw.com, and the BAR/BRI bar exam preparation program, combine to produce roughly 40% of Thomson's $7.6 billion in annual revenues.

West also employs over 100 legal editors in the U.S., who toil day and night reviewing court decisions and preparing summaries of their major points of law for use by lawyers doing legal research. So the hiring of a handful of lawyers in India may not seem like much of a threat to the larger U.S. legal staff -- especially when West requires the Indian lawyers' work to be quality-checked by the U.S. lawyers.

But eventually, the Indians' work will no longer need to be reviewed. They are, after all, qualified lawyers in their own right, English-speaking, and educated in a common law system (the same legal system as in the U.S.) And they receive on-the-job training from West instructors in India, supplemented by supervision and feedback from their counterparts in the U.S. Ultimately, the Indian lawyers' work product will equal the quality of the Americans', at which point, the biggest difference between West's U.S. and Indian lawyers will be that the Indians earn about one-fifth the salaries of the Americans.

How long it takes to reach that point should determine whether West decides to expand the program. For as IBM has learned, the difference between the wages paid to foreign workers and to U.S. workers does not translate immediately into corresponding savings. On the contrary, while IBM's Indian employees earn about one quarter the salaries of their U.S. counterparts, outsourcing industry analysts predict the company will save less than 25% on the cost of the workers in their first year.

This is probably due to the fact that the new workers, even if they have skills equivalent to their U.S. counterparts', are not thoroughly familiar with American laws. This would increase overhead costs for IBM, which would have to assign American in-house lawyers to check the Indians' work, decreasing efficiency and increasing costs.

But once the Indian lawyers are brought up to speed, those inefficiencies should disappear, making each dollar saved on wages more and more likely to translate into a dollar saved on operating costs for West. The example of another high profile user of legal services, General Electric, seems to bear this thesis out. By creating its own in-house legal department in India, GE reports that in 2001 its plastics division saved approximately half a million dollars that would otherwise have been spent on American advice purchased from American law firms. By 2002, those savings had already increased by 40%.

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