What do you think? Is outsourcing to India really the answer for Contract Counsel?

By almost any measure, David Galbenski’s company was a success. Contract Counsel, which Galbenski and a law school buddy, Mark Adams, started in 1993 from Galbenski’s parents’ basement in Royal Oak, Michigan, helps companies find lawyers on a temporary contract basis. The growth over the past five years had been furious. Revenue went from less than $200,000 to some $6.5 million at the end of 2003, and the company was placing thousands of lawyers a year.
And then the revenue growth began to flatten.
The company grew just 8 percent in 2004 despite a robust market for legal services estimated at about $250 billion in the United States alone. Frustrated and concerned, Galbenski stepped back and began taking a hard look at his business. Could he get it back on the fast track? “Most business books say that the hardest threshold to cross is that $10 million sales mark,” he says. “I knew we couldn’t afford to grow only 10 percent a year. We needed to blow right through that number.”
For that to happen, Galbenski knew he had to expand his customer base beyond the Midwest into large legal supermarkets such as Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C. He also knew that in doing so, he’d run into stiff competition from larger, publicly traded rivals. Contract Counsel’s edge had always been its low price. Clients called when dealing with large-scale litigation or complicated merger-andacquisition deals, either of which can require as many as 100 lawyers to manage the discovery process and the piles of documents associated with it. Contract Counsel’s temps cost about $75 an hour, roughly half of what a law firm would charge, which allowed the company to be competitive despite its relatively small size. Galbenski was counting on using the same strategy as he expanded into new cities. But would that be enough to spur the hypergrowth that he craved?