Offshore paralegal services are not a salary comparison
Most firms price offshore paralegal services against one number: what a paralegal costs at home. The Robert Half Salary Guide publishes current-year ranges for paralegals by experience level and by city, so the arithmetic takes a minute and lands lopsided every time. None of it is wrong. It is just answering a question nobody asked, which is what the work costs to produce rather than what it costs to run.
What offshore paralegal services change, and what they leave alone
They change how much drafting, indexing, chronology building, records chasing and discovery prep a firm can put through in a week, for a given payroll. That is a real change and it is the reason the model works at all. What they do not change is the boundary on what a paralegal may be handed, which is drawn by supervision and legal judgment rather than by where the desk sits. A motion still gets read by someone admitted before it goes out. Records summaries still get checked against the records.
So the firm ends up with two lines that scale at different rates. Production is elastic and priced offshore. Review is fixed, priced in partner hours, and already spoken for. Add four drafters to one reviewer and the drafts do not disappear into the reviewer, they stack up behind them, and the firm now has a backlog it is paying for on both sides.
Four drafters and one reviewer is not capacity. It is a queue with better margins.
The number that decides sits inside the firm, not on the rate card
Write the job description off an existing paralegal's duty list. Collect three rate cards. Pick the one that reads best and start the following Monday. That sequence is how most of this gets bought, and it never touches the variable that determines the outcome.
The honest version runs the other way around. Count the hours a week a licensed attorney in the firm can actually give to reading somebody else's output, after their own matters and their own court dates. Divide that by what a review takes for the matter type in question. Whatever comes out is the ceiling on delegated work, and it is the same number whether the person producing the work is in Cebu or across the hall. The rate card tells a firm how many producers it can afford. It says nothing about how many it can use.
Which is why the firms that get burned are rarely the ones that paid too much. A rate five times lower is a genuine advantage, and it is an advantage on the half of the operation that was not the problem. Price the reviewer first.
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