Outsourcing is increasingly common. There are opportunities for you to save money, gain efficiency, and spread the wealth around the world. We’ve been doing it in a variety of ways for several years with great success.

We outsource most of our technology, marketing, accounting, human resources, and executive assistant services. We’re always looking for ways to better serve our clients, and outsourcing helps us find excellent providers at lower cost.

Recently, our North Carolina State Bar issued a Proposed Formal Ethics Opinion relating to the outsourcing of clerical or administrative tasks to individuals in foreign countries. It was responding to an inquiry regarding the use of an Indian company that provides typing and transcription services (2011 F.E.O. 14).

If adopted, the opinion will require disclosure of the use of the company and will mandate obtaining the client’s written consent. The opinion is consistent with opinions released by state bars in Ohio and New York and by the American Bar Association (Formal Opinion 08-451).

When we realized the inevitability of this opinion, we took action. Last October, we modified our client agreement to reflect the use of outsourced foreign labor and services. We inserted the following language in the agreement:

“The Client acknowledges that he or she is employing the Firm instead of any particular individual and that the Firm will assemble the team of professionals best suited to each Client to serve the Client’s specific needs and requirements at each stage of the Representation. Sometimes our professionals will reside outside of the United States and Client specifically consents to the use of these professionals.”

We ran the language by our private ethics counsel and obtained their approval. We’ve been using it in our client agreement for five months now.

Of course, since the Formal Ethics Opinion hasn’t yet been approved in our state, we haven’t yet had a problem with the language, and hopefully it will satisfy the requirements of our regulator.

More significantly, we’ve now presented the agreement to many clients without any issues. We haven’t had a single client question the language, nor have any of them worried about the security or professionalism of the work. The language didn’t cause any upset or disruption at all.

If you outsource any services (including, for instance, transcription of voicemail or provision of e-mail), I’d encourage you to include similar language in case your services are fulfilled in other nations. Of course, you should run this by your ethics counsel just to be safe. It’s inevitable that something you’re doing or using involves outsourcing to someone outside of the United States, and you’re better off being safe than inadvertently getting caught up in an ethics trap.