It's not that lawyers are overpaid, it's just that they don't compete with the world for prices and they all agree on certain prices in their own market. You can't outsource a lawyer to India because he most likely doesn't know US law. Also we programmer have this extraordinarily poor ability to SELL ourselves. We should try to factor in the time we bill the time it took us to get to that kind of knowledge we have, like pharma companies factor in the cost of research and then sell a single blue pill at 20US a pop!
There's no reason a lawyer in India couldn't learn US law. He probably wouldn't even start very far behind US citizen. The real problem is that he can't set foot in a US courtroom without a visa.
There's an amount of legal work currently outsourced to India - things that can be legally outsourced, that is. Currently, the class of things that can be legally outsourced is small (research + writing + document review.)
Yeah right, even a German lawyer could learn US law, except he wouldn't even be able to call himself a lawyer in US, cause even without the visa he couldn't practice the profession.
