Do lawyers have to disclose to their clients they have outsourced work for a cheaper rate?

I was astonished to read this in today's Star myself. The issues - should lawyers advise clients that the work will be outsourced and should any of the savings that result be passed on to the clients?

When you get right down to it, there does not seems to be anything unethical in this practice of outsourcing. The client retains a lawyer to work on a legal matter, the lawyer does the work and/or gets the work done and signs off on it. The client assumes that the work has been done to the lawyer's satisfaction and pays the fee agreed upon for the work performed. If anything untoward is discovered subsequently, the lawyer can and will be held responsible for errors and omissions.

Consequently, from the point of view of the quality and standard of the work performed, while skeptical, I cannot object to the outsourcing of legal work.

My skepticism stems from the idea that clients' confidential matters could fall into the hands of people who may not be held to the same standards to which Canadian law societies hold their professionals. Also, clients unaware that their matter has been outsourced could be confronted by repercussions they were unprepared for. (I choose not to be too specific here and will leave this to your own knowledge of the way the world works at present).

Another hesitation I have is over the number of Canadian lawyers and paralegals who are underemployed because work that they can do is being sent overseas. This deprives them of income they could be earning and could in the long run discourage some of our brightest and best young people from entering the legal profession. Will there be a pool large enough to replace lawyers as they retire or will there be a shortage in the future?

In the medical profession, patients have the right to stipulate that surgery will be performed by a particular surgeon and that surgeon only. Of course, the patient has to assume the risk of having to wait until such time as the operation fits into the surgeon's schedule. Don't know if you will consider this to be an appropriate analogy, but should the same thing be demanded of the legal profession?

Should the savings from outsourcing be passed on to clients? Yes, but will they? Not in this lifetime.

Is this really different then them having a paralegal do it(or whatever the equivalent in Canada is). Is it really different then looking up the cases that they already did 100 times? It's not really new research for them most of the time. They are always ripping people off in that sense. I doubt that they have to tell you this is what they are doing, and you aren't going to get a discount. Most will go to a lawyer who has won that type of case a lot of times, but still pay the same rate even though the lawyer knows how the case is handled.

No, they also don't have to tell you when a paralegal, intern, or software program did the work.

These "savings" are on them doing their job.