The Times of India has a nice article on how companies have begun outsourcing patent searches to Indian companies. In my job I often encounter the outsourcing option as many companies on cost cutting missions see this as a quick fix. In some areas outsourcing can cause problems, but I do not suspect that patent searching is an area that will cause problems. India has a huge amount of well educated engineers who can search patent applications just as well as anybody. This combined with the fact that the most patent active companies already have global partners will drive this trend on.
In the article the patent service outsourcing market is estimated to 2.2 bn$$ and the number of Indian workers in this area will be more than 6000 in 2012. That number of workers probably mirrors the whole IP adviser workforce in northern Europe. the question is then what will the european specialists do then when another of their areas dissapear (the first one was translations)?
This will require changes in both the outsourcing companies and their advisers…I´m looking forward to facilitating those changes.