Imperial paths of control of the Global North are often seen to be evolving but remain entrenched in the countries they had once formal dominion over. The legal field being a crucial instrument of control that capital deploys over the economy, provides an insight into some of these mechanisms of domination particularly in their impact across international borders. India’s legal field is linked in many ways to its colonial past in terms of structure of its systems but also in the present to how it exports legal services to its former coloniser. These exports of legal services to the United Kingdom, United States and other countries in the Global North have become the crucible of experimentation in value capture, workplace control and domination over workers’ lives. India’s neoliberal transformation is slowly coming to its full maturity, and its implications have been particularly grave for workers, particularly those working in legacy sectors that do not guarantee sufficient wages or dignified working conditions. The implications of this transformation have not been restricted only to blue-collar or informal workers but have also extended to affect the white-collar workers. In this essay, the authors seek to shed light on the conditions of the workers in the legal services export sector who are often overlooked by researchers in the Global North and South alike. These workers are politically fragmented with very little trade union organisation, belong mostly to dominant castes who are able to access English language education, and form part of the middle classes where most entry level white collar workers are located, while having low social capital especially among the legal fraternity.

Since the economic liberalisation of India in 1991, the world of white-collar workers in India has undergone dramatic changes. Until the 1980s, the term white-collar workers in India was largely used to refer to workers in the public sector, mainly those who used to work in clerical positions in the service sector(s). With liberalisation however, a great demand for transactional legal work both in the domestic and the international arenas was sought. In addition to the economic aspects of neoliberalism, the other major implications of neoliberalism were felt within the socio-cultural domains. The social structure that one finds in India remains critically dependent on a large section of outsourced workers, irrespective of the public or private nature of the job. Even within the public sector, the number of outsourced or contractual workers have grown tremendously, far more than the growth of formal job opportunities.[^] Amidst the rise of outsourced and contractual workers, white-collar professional jobs in India have become the vestiges of biopolitical control exerted by neoliberal capitalism in India. Biopolitical control in this context:

… not only involves the production of material goods in a strictly economic sense but also touches on and produces all facets of social life, economic, cultural, and political.²

The growth of biopolitical control over the workers has meant that global capitalism today controls not only the value that they directly generate but also the kind of emotions that they harbour within themselves and can be used to indirectly generate value. The basic premise within which such a mode of control is inflicted upon the society primarily stems from the kind of workplaces that are rendered mainstream in contemporary society, which are built to ensure a level of productivity and co-operation among the workers.

Modern office spaces emerged in the 1960s in the Global North, but some of their most pernicious effects are being felt within the corporate sector that have emerged in the Global South. The world of white-collar workers today is a world dominated by cramped cubicles, trendy furniture and hyper-productive mental or intellectual labour.³ Cities such as Bengaluru, Gurugram and Hyderabad have become the major city spaces characterised by the presence of such workers. The origins of the global white-collar workers goes back to the lawyers’ offices on Wall Street and their need for a professional group of clerks characterised by a certain compliance towards the systems in place, as distinct from the traditional blue-collar industrial working class who characterised the manufacturing sector.⁴ In India, the growth of white collar jobs created a distinct change within the country’s over socio-economic positioning, altering the structure of class aspirations and class consciousness among a significant section of the working population.

Neoliberal Transformation of the Legal Sector in India

Legal professions are considered to be one of the lucrative options available for educated individuals. India has a staggering number of 63,759 lawyers and 69,290 paralegals.⁵ In recent times, outsourcing of paralegal work to India has become a highly lucrative option for many law firms in the Global North, especially those from the United Kingdom And the US. The reasons that many law firms in the Global North prefer Indian paralegals over and above their western counterparts are threefold: cheap wages, higher labour flexibility and better proficiency in English relative to other countries of the Global South. At the same time, the inefficient labour laws in India that favour lower wages and lesser rates of unionisation in the corporate sector also make it an ideal destination for outsourcing legal work to India. Noronha et al. describe the structural reasons why the long-term core of offshore Legal Process Outsourcing (LPO) work may remain entrenched in the LPO industry in India.⁶

First, India shares a common law system with the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, and Australia (and much of the global North) because of the colonial legacy of legal systems. Knowledge production in Global South countries often remains closely linked through the dependencies established during direct imperial control and so it is with the discipline of law. The legal system serves a dual purpose - enabling the transactions that help to integrate the economy of India with that of the Global North and helps establish an export service sector. Second, India churns out many qualified lawyers (with varying levels of competence), establishing a steady supply of legal personnel who are available for approximately 20% of the cost of their counterparts onshore.[7] Finally, the time difference between many countries of the Global North and India syncs with available communication technologies such that legal support is offered around the clock for critical projects.⁸ Two legal workers who have now settled in Bengaluru and Mumbai respectively after migrating from Guwahati – the capital of the northeastern state of Assam which is one of the most underdeveloped regions of the country – have narrated about their experiences while working for LPOs. The first legal worker from Bengaluru states:

Working as a LPO worker is a difficult business. We are not trained for this as well. For most of us, who come from underdeveloped regions, it is a very difficult transition. Most of us find it difficult to settle in these new spaces, there is so much convenience everywhere, something that we cannot even imagine back home. The work is also a horrendous one. Most of our office timings are after 8 or 9 PM, no time for family, or friends.

On the other hand, the worker from Mumbai states:

Some of us come into the profession just because it is a way out of our traditional spaces. Nobody wants to stay in Guwahati anymore, and everybody wants to come here and settle. But they do not realise that coming here is a difficult choice. You have to forget about family and friends and community. For months, I have been trying to get my mother here, but then I wonder if she even comes, then I will not be able to give her any time. I tried contacting the company as well, including the head HR, but he also said that he cannot do anything, and that there are no leaves left. I took a few when I fell seriously ill, after coming here because of the weather change.

These experiences narrated by legal workers reflect the problems that one faces while working for a neoliberal corporation, which can easily be found in other sectors as well such as call centre workers and software workers. The neoliberal transformation of the legal industry has rapidly altered commercial and transactional legal work. When LPOs (or alternative legal services providers) were initially introduced in much of the Global South including India, they started offering better work-life balance and fair pay compared to the traditional legal employers and litigation agencies. Many of these workplaces positioned themselves as being pathways to corporate career options for lawyers who needed a middle ground between the partnership track at law firms and private practice as litigating lawyers. The early success of LPO models in attracting large, high value offshore projects based on the existent global value chains (such as software procurement) threatened, albeit briefly, to end the traditional law firm’s monopoly of social capital that they provided to its lawyers along with their (often elite) clientele and revenue. The LPOs promised the ‘best-management-practices’ which attracted a wide range of new lawyers towards them. A young Muslim lawyer who has recently begun working at an LPO – after working for around two years under a more experienced lawyer in Bengaluru – stated:

I wanted to work with an LPO because they do it like a regular job without all the issues associated with a traditional lawyer job, where I have to understand the process from my clients. It is easier to be directed, and they also run a good management which makes it easier. Higher salaries, benefits, it is good for people like me who want a decent life without all the chaos of a courtroom on an everyday basis.

The proposed inquiry would speak about such outsourced legal workers from India, contextualising them within globalised neoliberal capitalism. Drawing from interviews and field research in Bengaluru and Mumbai, the inquiry reveals their conditions of social, technical, and political composition, which are often rendered completely invisible within mainstream frameworks – both in India and abroad. It also sheds light on some of these practices which may be bleeding into other traditional parts of the legal sector so that workers across sub-industries can take note and calibrate their organisational strategy accordingly. It bases itself upon the classic workers’ inquiry method that entails investigating workplaces and employment relations from workers’ perspectives to provide a basis for organising them. Over time, historical debates within orthodox trade unionism based on Leninist and Trotskyist traditions sharpened this Marxist research tradition, especially since Fordist and Taylorist visions of workplace management began to dominate strategic thinking in the manufacturing sector.⁹ However, the world today has moved beyond both Fordist and Taylorist models. Negri highlights that contemporary capitalism has moved towards embracing more biopolitical modes of control rather than ones based on abject domination.¹⁰

Possibilities of Worker Resistance

The legal profession in India has historically been dominated by the middle class. The traditional legal workers in India, including the lawyers and especially those who form a large section of the average lawyers in India, come from the middle class. With the rendering mainstream of outsourced legal workers as well, the middle class or those who are aspiring to be a part of the upwardly mobile middle class have begun to form a majority of the outsourced legal workers as well. The kind of class consciousness that most of these workers harbour within themselves is different from the one that is usually found among the industrial or the informal workforce in India. The process of self-organisation of the workers is extremely difficult in these contexts because most of these workers harbour within themselves a disdain for the terminology and the connotations associated with the term, ‘working class.’¹¹ Attitudes toward workers self-organising themselves in the Indian corporate industries – IT, legal or otherwise - have been viewed positively in the Indian space and globally in the last couple of decades; although recognized or major unions have not always been visible. Due to the global slowdown, the IT sector in India has suffered from a wave of mass layoffs and pay cuts which have created an upsurge of occupational anxiety and low-job security among the workers. Most of these issues have created an ideal ground for the IT unions to make advances within the professional workers, including the legal workers working for the corporate legal firms. Several recognized unions appear today on the IT and ITES horizon—the All India IT & ITeS Employees Union (AIITUE), Union of IT and ITES Employees (UNITE), Karnataka IT Workers Union (KITU), and Tech Workers Coalition (India), among others. These unions have focused on wage and job insecurities, as well as resisting the deepening algorithmic management of IT and ITES work. However, the success of these unions have largely been lacklustre because of the nature of unionisation, which has more often than not steered clear of adopting radical approaches towards unionisation, and instead focused on garnering more employer-employee ‘friendly’ relations.¹² A lawyer from Bengaluru, who has been associated with one such ‘union’ narrates:

We are all part of the local lawyer’s association, mostly dominated by the ruling party people, but the major problem is that they rarely talk about the actual issues we face. For most of them, the main question is the amount of support that they can gather for the political parties for the elections. There are many lawyers here who are even card holding members of a particular political party and even take up cases which come against them. There is no option to go to other organisations as well because there are no powerful ones, and these are the very same people who can help you in times of need.

While the organisational activity in digital or virtual labour spaces is finding legal recognition and support, there may be technical-legal barriers to organisation in LPOs. Lawyers in India are regulated as professional workers under the Advocates Act 1961, and a High Court judgement has ruled that this professional status would prevent them from getting registered as a trade union under the relevant trade union legislation, as they do not share employee-employer status (I.A. Saiyed v. State of Maharashtra, 2006). The major problem that arises from such a definition and framework adopted by the state and the dominant structure in place is that legal workers are often stripped off their working-class identities. Although unions for lawyers are present, their legal recognition as trade unions remains difficult because of such roadblocks. Despite such roadblocks, legal unions such as the All India Lawyers’ Union (AILU), and the All India Lawyers Association for Justice (AILAJ) have continued to make great strides within the latter – often organising them as freelance workers, with or without being registered as a trade union. Unionising them as freelance workers also comes with its own share of problems, which have been narrated by an activist working with a radical trade union in Mumbai:

The problem is that most of the lawyers here do not see themselves as workers. Even if you ask me on a general day regarding who I am, it is not very natural of me to say that I am a worker. The entire system is such that we see ourselves as different from everybody else. We are like doctors, who also do not get that worker label, so naturally organising us is a bit difficult within traditional trade unions. We are here because we want to help people, and the union helps us do that. It does not matter much what label we get.

The practice of the law, as stated by the worker above,. is seen as a noble calling, and lawyers seen as beholden primarily to the court rather than their clients. This assumption expresses itself primarily in the form of an informal moratorium on trade unions, although Bar Councils composed of litigating lawyers are powerful lobbying bodies. They are member-driven and do have some democratic elements of decision making so in a way could be thought of as a proxy for trade unions. An outsourced legal worker, who had previously been active with a left-wing student organisation in her university states:

The problem with the bar councils is that they are not any radical body to change the system in place. Their major target remains to gather more and more members, but little more than that. They just have to produce their annual reports. One should ask them how many low waged legal workers they actually know? None. All of us are just numbers to them.

On being asked regarding the difficulties of unionisation, despite such dire conditions of legal workers, the same outsourced worker states:

We have been trying for years now. But the main problem is that when people become lawyers or legal workers, they think they have become something else entirely. Their entire outlook towards society changes. I have seen many of my own comrades, die hard Marxists during university days, and now working as mute spectators for these mainstream bar organisations.

The problems faced by legal workers increase manifold because mainstream trade unions have faltered when it comes to organising LPO workers. A key reason for the same has been their constant articulation of workers’ issues through a framework dominated by statism and labour bureaucracy, which are often the results of the close nexus of political party control over the Indian trade union movement. In India, the last three decades have seen a significant throttling of the ability of trade unions to obtain funds and sustain long term organising. This leads them to a party-affiliation model wherein they link themselves to a political party which provides them with regular funding, legal support and a general ecosystem within which the ups and downs of the membership base does not make it or break them in the short term. In the long term however, these unions are quick to lose their connection to the membership base and often become pressure groups rather than member based organisations which can win the bread and butter battles over wages and working conditions. Of course there are social organisations like associations and the like which have sprung up to take up the space left by trade unions, but they also come with a wide variety of limitations - mostly their inability to scale in any meaningful way.

The Crisis-Ridden Lives of LPO Workers

LPO workers may need to find solutions for legally recognized worker representative organisations where their identity as lawyers is not paramount. This means that their organisational framework needs to be based on their identities as salaried workers, rather than the one that they come to possess as independent contractors which essentially makes them a part of the capital-producing processes. The state of the legal industry in India is described as a massive unbundling of its workstreams. It has a diverse array of class, caste and gender positions embedded within itself, which makes it an extremely heterodox domain of employment. Traditionally, elite lawyers in India enjoyed high social capital as litigators or business lawyers, owing to their perceived importance as genuine business partners or advisors in disputes or commercial transactions. At the apex of their profession, lawyers enjoy a high socioeconomic position combined with cultural standing. However, the traditional route to such economic independence and social mobility is through decades of painstaking legal practice often performed in exchange for extremely low wages. When these workers go into LPOs, the natural propensity remains bound by their own atomistic aspirations, which under neoliberalism bases itself upon a necropolitical and anti-solidarity based framework.¹³

LPOs primarily share a vendor-client relationship with corporations and law firms in the Global North, though there are some exceptions. Various types of LPOs exist - some are exclusive captive units of UK based law firms, while most are independent corporations who work on a contract basis for Global North corporations. Consequently, the size of the workforces ranges from around 50 to around 250-300 workers. There has also been a recent wave of consolidation as ‘the Big Four’ accounting firms have been acquiring LPO assets in an attempt to offer full service legal services. Work that is outsourced is of varied quality and volume. This can include document review for court cases, remedial work such as automating and updating or abstracting contracts across various supply chains. More uncommonly, LPOs are also seen to take part in negotiation and drafting of major vendor contracts alongside the full time lawyers of Global North corporations. Most of the work is standardised, since workers can be trained to do atomised and repetitive tasks (such as document coding and contract abstraction) in a short period of time as compared to more complex legal tasks (such as drafting and negotiation of contracts).

Increasingly there are reports of LPO workers being used to train contract management systems in order to automate the workflow of finalising low value contracts. LPOs promise a direct access to such social capital without the bottlenecks of elite gatekeeping that had once pervaded the legal sector. Prior studies noted that this substitution had not come to pass, although the industry provided a stable income for lawyers from non-elite backgrounds without the benefits of social capital accrued from commercial practice in a law firm or as a litigating lawyer.¹⁴ Over a period, the professional trade-off for any lawyer entering this sector has become clear—LPO lawyers enjoy decent mobility within the industry itself, but they do not, on average, gain enough skill to become trusted business advisors or legal counsels. More worryingly, there is evidence that most employees progressively become deskilled to the extent that they are content to lock into a particular project and continue in a role for years without growth in wages or responsibilities. Hiring teams at various law firms recognize the threat that LPOs pose to traditional legal practice and harshly discriminate against workers who have spent more than a short stint in the industry. This is because the legal profession in India is largely seen as being a traditionally public-service-based job as independent contractors, which does not encompass working for transnational and multinational corporations. A young lawyer, who is currently working as a freelance lawyer and desires to go for a LPO based job states:

Working as a freelancer gives me more scope to use my legal knowledge and help people if I want to. But working in an LPO gives me social security. I prefer the latter.

This is seen in reflections of workers during applications for non-LPO jobs, with many receiving rejections with one-line feedback - we are not looking at low-cost solutions such as yourself - assuming their low experience and showing a general disdain for any project successfully completed within an LPO setup. Such issues contribute to a class divide within the legal workers. It also contributes, as Harry Cleaver had noted regarding the segmentation of workers, which in turn leads to a gradual rise of the domination of capital.¹⁵ These segmentations do not allow these workers to evolve into a united workforce, and contribute to the maintenance of low-cost, low-value outsourcing options available within the global market. By ensuring low mobility towards other sub-sectors of legal work, the LPO employee base remains confined within its own industrial issues, with successful exits from traditional legal employment relatively rare. Observers have predicted that the use of data analytics, custom products, and the cheap cost of data processing in India would provide a fillip to this industry and emerge as growth drivers.¹⁶ However, over the last decade, the relative stagnancy of legal budgets has meant that the sector has not achieved the heights that had once been promised. To close this gap, techniques such as off-payroll solutions (such as the semi- permanent secondment of lawyers by legal recruiters to companies) and the use of several LPOs and boutique law firms to induce a race to the bottom in prices are becoming increasingly common. This spur in work for LPOs is not a result of businesses valuing legal work more but rather the result of a great unbundling of legal work, with companies now using the trend of smaller budgets to exercise far more control over day- to-day activities than in the earlier retainership model of external law firms or hiring of internal legal counsel. These issues also come to influence the problems that workers face themselves within the organisations that they remain a part of including the organisations that are supposed to represent their interests, as the young lawyer from Guwahati now working in Mumbai referred to earlier states:

To begin with, we are lawyers, and we need to be treated as such. There is not much work that comes our way anyway. The work is very little, mostly coming from companies who want help with local legal issues, and that too only because they cannot find somebody in the UK or Canada. The budget also is very low and so whenever we ask the HR or the manager, they just shrug us off saying that they do not have funds. Same is the case with unions as well. They are just occupied with lawyers who are in the court. People like us are just stuck in the middle, and do not get any help mostly from them.

Contemporary LPOs remain structurally sandwiched between these interests as they compete for an ever-decreasing slice of outsourced legal work. This means that a lot of these firms place an overarching emphasis on the extraction of relative surplus value to extend their profits, which is a natural trait of contemporary forms of capitalism, as Tronti had highlighted back in the 1960s itself.¹⁷ This attitude of the law firms has led to grave consequences for many of the legal workers, often resulting in deaths due to exhaustion and organ failure.¹⁸ The cleavages within the legal sector ensure that the outsourced workers rarely get unionised like their counterparts in the traditional legal work-based sectors. The lack of unionisation along with a gradual dismantling of workers’ benefits makes them a highly vulnerable part of the Indian workforce that - in the words of a LPO worker – ‘sits in air-conditioned offices and does not believe that they are workers. It is a case of being in a state of permanent denial’.

Conclusion

The legal industry under neoliberalism has become a highly globalised one, with widespread exchange of human and financial resources between various countries. Under neoliberal capitalism, both the legal workers in the UK and India have come to be affected by a growing state of socio-economic crisis constructed by the slow decline of workers’ welfare measures in both India and the UK, and a constant fetishisation of austerity policies by successive governments. The precarity in terms of the lack of job security and social belongingness that is exhibited by the legal workers has become a part of their job description that has become increasingly globalised and exploitative in nature.

The struggle of the outsourced legal workers in India represents the most inhuman aspects of the struggles that workers in countries of the Global North go through albeit in a widely different context. The constant outsourcing of legal work to places such as India has wide scale ramifications for countries such as the UK, the US and the like because the cheap wages in developing nations often become the basis behind large scale unemployment and underemployment in the Global North. Under these circumstances, an alliance between the legal workers of the Global North and that of the Global South, especially on the questions of financial and social security has become a necessity that few can deny. The organisational trajectory of such an alliance however has to be in synchronisation with the struggles of the legal workers in both ends of the globe, emphasising their interconnectedness and the globalised model of exploitation of contemporary capitalism.