The US legal services market is the largest in the world, with cumulative revenues of about USD 2 trillion from 2012-18. And it is expected to grow to over USD 344 billion per year in 2023. By contrast, India’s legal services market was valued at approximately USD 1.3 billion in 2021.
This market was not open to compliance professionals in India before the pandemic. But now the doors have been flung wide open thanks to remote work. This is an unprecedented development of unimaginable consequences.
And because most Indian professionals are unable to imagine this, they do not explore what is possible for them.
Run a simple Google search with a keyword set like ‘US remote paralegal jobs’, ‘remote compliance jobs US’, or ‘remote bookkeeping jobs US’, and see what comes up. Without the slightest exaggeration, I can say that literally hundreds of thousands of opportunities await service providers in this sector.
Do you know why? Here are just two of the reasons:
- There are 200,000 law firms in the US with 0-20 employees. They are looking to use anywhere between 2 and 10 international remote paralegals per year
- Assuming 5 paralegals per firm, there is a need for 1 million paralegals per year!
And this, without even considering paralegal work from US startups, in-house legal departments of large corporations, and international companies which want to establish or boost their presence in the US.
Of course, they can hire US-based paralegals. But typical paralegal billing rates in the US range between USD 30 and 60 per hour, though most fall in the median of that range, according to the legal practice management cloud software Cosmolex.
As a remote paralegal with a CA/CS degree, you can offer to do the same work for USD 10-20, and still make 3x-5x more than you will in India for the same amount of work and time spent.
This can be life changing.
What kind of work will you have to do
Here are few key areas of work for Corporate Law Paralegals and Compliance Professionals:
- Incorporation
- Mergers and acquisitions
- Investment and finance transactions
- Corporate due diligence
- Securities law
- Corporate compliances and corporate governance
- Reporting and liasioning with regulators
- Corporate tax
- Insolvency, bankruptcy and restructuring
Grab the opportunity
The global enterprise governance, risk and compliance market size is expected to reach USD 75 billion in 2028, according to Fortune Business Insights.
To enter this market, you can qualify as a US Certified Public Accountant (CPA), or write the requisite bar exam, but that is an endlessly long route.
And you need not take that route to begin earning USD 10-20 per hour. You can simply work as a remote paralegal or a virtual assistant to a CPA/ corporate secretary/ law firm, or for US companies and startups. As the world is growing more and more comfortable with the remote work model post-Covid (16% US recruiters are now hiring exclusively remote talent), sourcing international assignments will become progressively easier.
Even if you only charge USD 10 per hour (and I have deliberately chosen the rock bottom rate), and work for a maximum of 200 hours a month, you make USD 2,000.
You will learn to do all this and much more at our Diploma in US Corporate Law for Company Secretaries and Chartered Accountants.
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