Legal Process Outsourcing – A New trend for Lawyers

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.