Lawyers are beginning to learn that globalization means fewer jobs in the USA.

Did all the lawyer-lawmakers who bought into free trade realize that it isn’t just manufacturing jobs they might be selling off to other countries? Mark Kobayashi-Hillary notes that the prediction that legal services would be outsources is an old one, but he also believes that companies now are beginning to seriously explore these possibilities. One piece of evidence supporting his supposition is that “Lloyds Banking Group is negotiating a £400m acquisition of CPA Global, the patent and legal services group.”

What does CPA Global do? According to its website, CPA Global is “one of the leading legal outsourcing companies in the world, offering a full range of general legal and intellectual property (IP) support services.” Among other things, CPA Global provides

services such as document review, contract management and litigation support right through to top end intellectual property software, renewals and data management, research and consulting – assisting busy law firms and corporate legal departments throughout the litigation and IP lifecycle.

Law students and lawyers moan that if they work for “Big Law” they’ll spend years doing document review, but, hey, it’s a living. Without those jobs, the entire market, already shrinking, shrinks more. And now lawyers too begin to learn what globalization really means: selling to other countries with lower labor standards the jobs the U.S. labor market has spent a century making half-decent for the people who do them here.