Outsourcing Legal Work: An Overview

The legal industry is experiencing a worldwide paradigm shift in the mode of delivery for legal services in recent years. This method of transferring legal processes to the low-wage, yet highly skilled markets overseas is termed as Legal Process Outsourcing or LPO. With time, LPO is becoming increasingly popular as they help the law firms minimize costs to a great extent, thereby increasing flexibility, and consequently their in-house capabilities.

With the advent and progress in Internet services, it has become a lot easier to outsource legal work internationally. The LPO industry has become extremely popular throughout the international market thereby creating waves all across the globe. Initially, LPO appealed to large law firms and multinational corporations on account of its economic viability. However, today, even the small and mid-size legal markets have started to capitalize on the phenomenal rise of the LPO industry. LPO assists in leveling the playing field for the relatively smaller organizations, which might not have sufficient resources, staff, and in-house expertise, thus providing them with an opportunity to escalate their operations for a particular lawsuit or project at a cost lower than that of others. Implementation of various identifiable and measurable quality control initiatives help the LPO companies consistently deliver top quality work, thereby attracting various multinational corporations and law firms to outsource complex legal documents to the overseas market.

The wide range of legal services which are being outsourced across the globe include document review for litigation support, e-discovery, legal transcription, legal research, pre-litigation documentation, contract drafting, contract management, due diligence compliance, and intellectual property asset management services. While India is seeing phenomenal growth in the Legal Process Outsourcing market as the most popular offshore destination, the LPO industry is also gaining momentum in Australia, China, Philippines, and South Korea.

The working of the LPO industry today makes the complex legal processes simple, thereby helping the domestics legal firms work more efficiently and effectively as a major burden of the complex legal documentation work is done by the LPO companies overseas. The various attributes that make LPO the most lucrative option are discussed below:

Economic viability: Legal employees in the overseas markets earn up to 30 to 70 percent lower wages when compared to their U.S. counterparts. This allows the domestic firms to reap a lot of cost savings, since the cost of infrastructure in India and several other overseas markets is remarkably low.
Access to the worldwide labor pool: India, along with other offshore destinations provides a large, English speaking trained labor force. Apart from this, it is predicted that the skilled labor force in India would increase at a rate of about 15 million a year, which ensures a great pool of qualified employees for the law firms in USA, Europe, and several other parts of the world, where there is an ever increasing demand for labor.
Round-the-clock availability of services: On account of the 12-hour time difference between India and USA, 24/7 operations are possible. The various offshore teams work round-the-clock for pressing legal projects, thereby meeting stringent deadlines and delivering high quality work.
Enhanced Flexibility: By engaging both offshore and onshore labor force, the companies may tailor their capabilities according to client demands and the workload. Domestic firms are enabled to tap into global expertise which is often found to be missing within the organization.
Maintaining high confidentiality: The legal information outsourced by the domestic law firms and multinational corporations are of high privacy and confidentiality. The Indian LPO companies are extremely particular about the security of such data and ensure zero leakage of information by implementing various high standard security measures.

Thus, it can be rightly asserted that Legal Process Outsourcing has imparted a considerable amount of flexibility to the functioning of the International law firms and multinational companies, and at the same time has turned out to be a full-bloomed profession for offshore attorneys, lawyers, as well as law firms. With the amount of buzz that it has already created in the International market, it surely has a long way to go.

About The Author:
The author is a Legal Consultant having a deep knowledge about legal services & working with a reputed Legal Process Outsourcing Firm.

Tags: LEGAL SERVICES, LEGAL AID SERVICE, LPO INDIA, LEGAL OUTSOURCING INDIA, OUTSOURCING LEGAL WORK, LEGAL EXPERTS, INDIA LEGAL SERVICES

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Outsourcing Legal Work: An Overview