I recently took part in an event focused on intellectual property (IP) at the Hardwicke Building in the centre of the Lincoln’s Inn law chambers. Lincoln’s Inn is such a beautiful part of London, but if you don’t have any business with the legal community then it’s easy to miss it entirely in the rush to use Holborn or Chancery Lane tube stations.

BACFI, The Bar Association for Commerce Finance and Industry organised the talk, which was attended by a large group of employed lawyers – employed in the sense that they work as legal counsel within regular organisations, rather than within law firms. I was one of four speakers within a one-hour slot so rapid-fire information was the name of the game.

The other speakers focused on defining intellectual property itself, outlining the type of protective frameworks a company can use for IP, then a description of the Tata brand - as Tata Consultancy Services is now working within the Legal Process Outsourcing environment – then me talking about some of the issues regarding data protection and IP.

I focused particularly on India, because that is where most of the negative news stories have originated. There was a front-page story in The Sun almost two years ago, detailing a sting operation where a reporter managed to purchase personal information on UK consumers from call centres in India. I talked about some of the steps taken by Nasscom to counter this issue, the reality that we see more breaches in the UK, the required changes to the IT Act of 2000 in India, and how many of the doubts about doing this work in India has led the marketplace to become much tougher than the regulatory environment demands.

I made the point by producing one electronic gadget after another from various pockets and pointing out that here I was inside a law firm with enough storage in my pocket to capture everything I wanted, and then some more. Getting into an Indian BPO firm with all that kit in my pocket – especially the 60Gb iPod - would be a lot harder.

Something I have observed in my own new book is that the market for Legal Process Outsourcing is significant, but growth at present is flat or very slow. This is partly because of the conservative nature of most law firms, often partnerships with very well established ways of doing things. It’s also a result of the type of information these law firms are dealing with – it’s just not the kind of data you want to leave the room, let alone the office, let alone the country. Yes, data protection measures are improving within the offshore outsourcing supplier community, but there will always be some processes that are best kept local.