Offshore paralegal cost is not a salary comparison
How much does an offshore paralegal cost compared to hiring locally has a clean answer and a misleading one. The clean answer is the wage gap, and it is wide enough that nobody seriously argues about it. What makes it misleading is that a wage gap is not a cost comparison. Two hires with the same job title can carry different supervision loads, different ramp periods, and different odds of having to be replaced inside a year, and every one of those is money. Price the role, not the wage.
Why the hourly comparison answers the wrong question
Wage against wage is the comparison firms build because wage is the only number both sides publish. That is not laziness. A managing partner asking what a paralegal costs is asking a budget question, the budget is built on salary lines, and the salary line is the one a comparison can be defended on in a partner meeting. It is also genuinely the largest single number in the calculation. Nobody choosing between two paralegals should pretend the difference is trivial.
But the wage line is the most static line in the whole exercise. It is set at the offer and it moves once a year. Everything else moves weekly: how many hours a supervising attorney spends checking work, how long before the hire can take a matter through without a second read, how often the firm is back at the start. Comparing the fixed line and ignoring the volatile ones is how a decision gets made on the least informative number available.
The wage is the only number both sides publish, so it becomes the only number anyone compares.
The three lines a real comparison has to include
A defensible comparison prices three things beyond salary, and it prices them for both candidates rather than treating the local hire as the free baseline.
- Supervision, valued at the reviewing attorney's rate. Supervision of non-lawyer assistants sits with the firm under the model rules, which means review hours are hours not spent billing. A hire who needs six review hours a week costs the firm more than the salary difference suggests, wherever that hire sits.
- Ramp, measured to the first matter that clears without a second read. Ramp is not a grace period, it is a stretch during which the firm pays two people to produce one person's output. Some of that gap is training quality rather than geography, which is exactly why it belongs on both sides of the ledger.
- Replacement risk, priced as the cost of doing the whole exercise again. Turnover resets ramp and supervision to zero and adds the hiring cycle on top. A cheaper hire who leaves in eight months is not cheaper.
Run those three lines honestly and the answer stops being a single number. Some firms have partner capacity to spend on review and no budget for salary. Others have the budget and no attorney with an hour to spare, and for them the expensive local hire who needs less oversight is the correct purchase. The wage gap does not decide that. It only tells a firm what it already knew walking in.
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