In college, I wrote a paper about how the unionization model must eventually fail by collapsing under its own weight.  My professor hated it, and if I recall correctly, gave me a “D”.  This may have begun my downward spiral that resulted in my becoming a lawyer.  Nonetheless, I’m giving it another try. 

My hypothesis is that outsourcing legal work to India will provide a primary benefit to the prosecution, particularly the various United States Attorneys offices around the nation.  Check out the New York Times.

“I think the toothpaste is out of the tube,” said Mark Ford, director of the firm’s Knowledge Center, an office south of New Delhi with 30 Indian law school graduates who serve Clifford Chance’s global offices. Mr. Ford lived in India for six months to set up the center, and now manages it from London.

“We as an industry have shown that a lot of basic legal support work can successfully be done offshore very cost-effectively with no quality problems,” Mr. Ford said. “Why on earth would clients accept things going back?”

By reducing costs for legal services to a tenth of their current charge, the savings is staggering.  But so are the implications.

“We will continue to go to big firms for the lawyers they have who are experts in subject matter, world-class thought leaders and the best litigators and regulatory lawyers around the world — and we will pay a lot of money for those lawyers,” said Janine Dascenzo, associate general counsel at General Electric.

What G.E. does not need, though, is the “army of associates around them,” Ms. Dascenzo said. “You don’t need a $500-an-hour associate to do things like document review and basic due diligence,” she said.

Let’s relish in the leap of faith that partners at Biglaw are experts and “world-class thought leaders” for the moment, and consider instead what becomes of the $500-an-hour associates.  Without the support of Biglaw clients willing to pay to school some teletubby on lawyering, they disappear.  The partners aren’t digging into their own pockets to pay to see their smiling faces and flip-flopped toes show up every morning.  If clients won’t foot the bill, they’re out of there. 

Sure, a few will be left behind to fetch coffee and do emergency cite-checking (which is how Biglaw guys develop their lauded expertise and world-class thought leadership), but not enough to refill the ranks.  Once their bread-and-butter work is farmed out to Bangalore, the cubicles will be left farrow to return to their natural state.

This means that the Biglaw model will die as the non-existent associates are never developed to become rainmakers and thought leaders, and partner welfare will cease as the youngers no longer generate the revenue to compensate the elders.  The senior partners are determined not to let that happen.  At least not as long as they’re still getting their split of the profits.

With the end of the farm team system in Biglaw, yet the continuing need for youthful fodder to generate billable hours that corporate clients will happily pay, Biglaw has only one place remaining in which to find its new blood.  We know it’s an acceptable alternative, as they’ve already been milking it for years under the guise that foolish clients don’t realize that official titles and highly limited experience don’t translate easily into world-class thought leaders.

Where will these new future Biglaw partners of America come from?  You guess it.  The United States Attorneys offices.

This means that all those cut-throat law review editors, library book swipers, artful plagiarists, will vie for the jobs.  The competition will be relentless, as associate positions at Biglaw go the way of the dinosaur and their futures turn to black.  Once in the office, they will transfer their dreams of future Ferraris to centuries in prison, awaiting the day they can tell their Biglaw interviewer how many miscreants they put away for life as proof of their worth.  They will lay waste to defendants in the hope of eventual Biglaw hegemony.

Come on now, you don’t think these law school tigers are going to hang out a shingle and play defense lawyer, do you?  And you don’t think that Biglaw partners will be cherry-picked from the ranks of real estate closers or will drafters, do you?  The riff-raff of the law will never do.  Just as they gussy up former AUSAs now to be “top-notch litigators” in order to get their corporate clients to pay the hourly tariff, the United States Attorney’s office will become the only proving ground left for the development of the future earners of Biglaw after all the low-rent work has been shunted off to India.

And what’s in it for criminal defense lawyers?  There is one bit of fun remaining, as we redouble our efforts to make these smarty-pants prosecutors eat our dust when we show them that while they were writing student notes or blue-booking lawprof flights of fantasy, inchoate criminal defense lawyers had their noses to the grindstone and were learning how to kick butt on cross-examination.

And still, we’ll never get a job at Biglaw.  And that’s just fine.