MYSORE: The city's growing credentials as an emerging centre for knowledge-based services and the next major hub for Business Process Outsourcing activity will be further vindicated when New York-based Smith Dornan and Dehn launches its legal service offshoring business from Mysore.

Smith Dornan and Dehn is an international media, entertainment and intellectual property law firm headquartered in New York with clients such as 20th Century Fox, Sony Entertainment, HBO and Clinton Foundation. Its Indian subsidiary, SDD Global Solutions Pvt. Ltd., will be inaugurated on Sunday.

Malcolm Andrade, chief executive officer of SDD Global Solutions, told The Hindu here that Mysore was the first venture of the New York-based firm in India, and that it was chosen precisely for the advantages of easy availability of talent pool, salubrious climate, a superior quality of life that is absent in cities such as Bangalore and the fact that there were many Mysoreans who would prefer to return to their native city given its unsurpassed charm. A major portion of talent in Bangalore originated from Mysore and a sizeable number of people were prepared to return here if provided a chance, he said.

Mr. Andrade said offshoring legal services from India was a growing market and cited a BPO intelligence report from ValueNotes. which estimated that revenue from legal services offshoring from India was expected to cross one billion $ by 2015 from the current levels of 61 million $.

SDD Global Solutions will initially take up legal research, provide litigation support and immigration processing, and hire law graduates as also others. It hopes to have 60 employees by the end of the year and recruit another 300 legal professionals and other graduates in the next few years.

Paradigm shift

The firm has described the launch of its India operations from the city as a "paradigm shift in the way legal services are provided in the 21st century" and has justified its choice of Mysore by describing it as "... the ideal business location in India, which stands apart from India's congested and increasingly inflation-ridden major cities, yet hosts some of the top universities that serve as incubators for thousands of extremely qualified job candidates in the legal and information technology fields."

The firm said that it would not focus on low-end document processing or clerical work. The stress would be on higher-value services such as legal research, legal drafting, intellectual property registrations, anti-counterfeit operations, film and television production company management, immigration processing, tax planning and compliance, insurance claims administration, and a host of other functions. The long-term plan includes specialising and handling mergers and acquisitions with support from its Mysore-based subsidiary.

SDD Global Solutions was floated owing due to the effort of one of US's leading attorneys Russell A Smith, a Columbia Law School graduate.

Explaining the cost-benefits of offshoring legal services from India, Mr. Russel said in a release that clients in the West paid not for services, but for plush rented offices of the legal firms, which were based in the most expensive real estate markets in the U.S. "Our mission is to positively change the way in which legal services are provided in the western world". It was pointed out that employees in the Indian subsidiary would be housed in a state-of-the-art environment at 1/43rd the cost in the U.S. for comparable space.

"What Toyota has achieved in the automobile industry, google in the Internet and Infosys in software business, SDD Global Solutions will achieve in the world of legal services," Mr. Andrade added.

Mr. Smith was in Mysore to learn Yoga and was attracted by the city and decided to establish an offshore company for the parent firm.

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