What Corporate Counsels look out for?
Corporate counsels in the U.S. have outsourced all non-core legal tasks to legal process outsourcing (LPO) companies causing a flurry of activities in recent time. The tasks which are generally outsourced are contract management and review, data analysis and management, document drafting and production, due diligence, general litigation support services, e-Discovery, Intellectual Property (IP) services, and legal research and transcription. What impresses the corporate counsels are cost-effectiveness (corporate can invest its funds in other revenue generating activities); and superior quality of work among other things. Besides that, corporate do not need to employ, manage, and retain an elaborate staff on its pay-roll. By outsourcing the non-core legal tasks, the corporate are left with quality time to attend to the core functions and successfully manage other challenging projects. However, before engaging a legal process outsourcing company, the corporate legal departments should take into consideration factors like confidentiality, conflict checks, supervision, reporting, and communication. Corporate counsel has to ensure that the legal process outsourcing company has proper procedures, and policies to maintain client and data confidentiality besides robust conflict-checking procedures in place. It is equally important to ascertain that adequate supervision and reporting structures, timely communication exist in an ear marked legal process outsourcing company for maintaining a smooth and efficient outsourcing process to avoid subsequent pitfalls.
What law firms look out for? U.S. based law firms prefer to outsource basic legal and paralegal work to legal process outsourcing (LPO) companies and keep professional work in the firms. Over the years the law firms are reeling under pressure to minimize the cost of legal work and LPO companies have presented them with an opportunity, which the law firms have simply lapped. The law firms’ decision to engage LPO companies are based on astounding quality of work, impeccable turnaround and notable reduction in legal cost. For law firms, the engagement starts by executing a master service agreement with a LPO
company and tasting the water by assigning small projects to the concerned LPO vendor. Once the confidence is built and a comfort level is established, the law firms start sending legal drafting, legal research and other litigation support projects. In outsourcing legal work, the key concerns of law firms are conflict management, security and confidentiality, quality of work and cost which LPO vendors should be aware of and work towards improvement in quick time. Besides, LPO companies need to understand the emerging expectations of law firms and should try to offer right mix of delivery models, technology driven processes, right mix of resources at a competitive price to attract clients.