The term LPO or ‘Legal Process
Outsourcing’ stands for the process adopted by many law firms and the chambers
run by barristers in handing over a part of their work to external law
agencies.
Do they have to do this?
The main reason for the law firms
in the US and the UK for outsourcing their job to others is the adverse
economic condition they find themselves in.
When the question of reducing
extra staff comes up, it is usually the junior employees consisting of the
paralegals, newly qualified lawyers, admin people, and support lawyers who are
eventually shown the door. Though they do not seem to add much to the absolute
value of the firms, their absence puts the responsibility of doing daily
mundane and straightforward jobs on the highly experienced and qualified
lawyers. To avoid wasting valuable time on these jobs, the LPO is the best
option. This has resulted in making ‘Legal Process Outsourcing’ more popular.
The competitive prices offered by
LPO firms may make you think that only the simple jobs get outsourced. Tasks
like research and transcription of legal matters, creation, and maintenance of
databases, indexing, and scanning of evidence are outsourced. Outsourcing also
includes reviewing, coding, annotation, processing, management, drafting, and
patenting of documents as well as the creation of precedents and forms.
The simple daily mundane jobs are
not the only subjects for outsourcing. Acquisitions and mergers, complicated litigation, insolvency issues, compliance and patenting are also important
aspects of outsourcing. The biggest concern regarding outsourcing to an
external agency is confidentiality. Even
if the legal firms engaged in outsourcing activities have confidentiality agreements
with LPO companies in place, they still have to use off-site researchers over
whom they have lower control than the in-house investigators.
The barristers and lawyers can
provide some protection to their clients by removing their names from the documents
they send to their clients and can insist that the LPO firms they use to do the
same. Many other advantages however far outweigh the issue of confidentiality.
The law firms can avoid the cost or take responsibility for keeping a permanent
support staff. They can get an unlimited amount of ad-hoc help whenever they
need it.
The costs are more or less
competitive allowing the law firms to cover a larger volume of niche areas with
the network support provided by LPO companies. The services offered by these
LPO companies are worth keeping in mind if a modern-day law firm wants to
streamline its operations without losing its competitiveness.
