Ethical Considerations When IP Lawyers Outsource Paralegal Services

• Pages: 15-19
• Date: 01 June 2025
• Published date: 01 June 2025
• Author: Michael E. Mccabe Jr.,Lindsey Corbin

LANDSLIDE June/July 2025

Published in Landslide, Volume 17, Number 4, 2025. © 2025 by the American Bar Association. Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved. This information or any portion

thereof may not be copied or disseminated in any form or by any means or stored in an electronic database or retrieval system without the express written consent of the

American Bar Association.

15

Ethical Considerations

When IP Lawyers Outsource

Paralegal Services

Michael E. McCabe Jr. and Lindsey Corbin

The outsourcing of legal and law-related services, sometimes

referred to as “legal process outsourcing,”

1

is a common

practice in the legal services industry. Law f‌irms, in-house

legal departments, and government attorneys often contract with

external nonlawyer paraprofessionals to help manage workload,

reduce costs, and access specialized expertise.

The concept of “sending work out” is not new; law f‌irms

and corporate law departments in the United States have been

outsourcing legal support services for many years.

2

More recently,

though, there has been an explosion in overseas outsourcing

(sometimes called “oshoring”), particularly to India, but also

to countries such as South Africa and the Philippines, among other

nations.

3

Such delegation by lawyers to nonlawyer paraprofession-

als is a multi-billion-dollar global service industry.4

A 2008 analysis of the ethics of legal outsourcing by the Ameri-

can Bar Association (ABA) Standing Committee on Ethics and

Professional Responsibility cites several common examples of

outsourced tasks:

Outsourced tasks range from the use of a local photocopy shop

for the reproduction of documents, to the retention of a docu-

ment management company for the creation and maintenance

of a database for complex litigation, to the use of a third-party

vendor to provide and maintain a law f‌irm’s computer system,

to the hiring of a legal research service to prepare a 50-state

Michael E. McCabe Jr., Esq., is managing partner and

cofounder of McCabe Ali LLP, where he counsels attorneys

on ethics and represents patent, trademark, and other IP

lawyers, agents, and law f‌irms in bar investigations and

professional disciplinary proceedings before the USPTO’s

Oce of Enrollment and Discipline and state bars in Maryland,

D.C., and Virginia. He can be reached at mike@mccabeali.

com. Lindsey Corbin is founder and senior IP paralegal of

Delegate.Legal, where she and her team support IP lawyers

with highly experienced outsourced IP paralegal services.

She can be reached at lindsey@delegate.legal.

Image: Getty Images/Tashdique Mehtaj Ahmed