Legal associate vs. contract attorney

Most of the big companies that have a division that has some thing to do in legal outsourcing domain have begun with contract review and patent & contracts draft work. In the LPO domain these are the low hanging fruits. They are also not high margin activity. But it is easier to get in and grab a share of the pie. You can very well be a contract attorney with them.
But there are other specialized LPOs that are very quickly moving up the LPO value chain by taking up the ownership of document review. Document review, an essential part of ediscovery, is the biggest part of legal expenditure by corporates. Firms that were doing preliminary first level review and charging per document are now doing second level document review working on SLAs (service level agreements). LPOs are now discovering event chronologies, the concepts behind the data, the smoking guns and who's who in a litigation. LPOs still have a long way to go in terms of processes and scale. The consolidation wave is yet to hit the LPO market. But all the indications are that it soon will.