LPO – Solo Attorneys & Small Law Firms

As a matter of fact, legal process outsourcing industry is developing day by day. Encouraged by the big growth, small law firms and solo attorneys at offshore locations like US, UK, etc. are looking for opportunity and feasibility of outsourcing their work to law firms in locations like India. But, they have their own concerns and problems while choosing suitable LPO Vendor.

Trusting the vendor to be ultimately choosen is very important and significant in the process. If there is cynicism in once mind, the relationship will not succeed.

Choosing the vendor: It is not advisable for solo attorneys or small law firms to go after the big names because they won’t be the large client for them and therefore not always high on their priority list. Choose a mid-sized vendor, who has certain advantages that work in his favor, may be a non-metro location or may be attractive stock options for employees or whatever, such that he is able to provide you with quality resources and commitment to service with customized quality service. Make sure to meet the vendor before begining regular work with them. This may mean sitting in a coach seat for a trip half way round the world, but if the relation works out and grows, it will be worth the backache and the bad food!

Confidentiality: It is just natural to be worried about the confidentiality of the documents sent to offshore locations. India and Indians are no better or worse when it comes to protecting the confidentiality of data, so the same amount of caution as taken in once own country should be taken. Confidentiality shouldn’t be taken lightly and appropriate care be taken to build confidentiality into the contract to be signed with the vendor with heavy penalties in the event of a violation.

Conduct pilots: Good looking websites, ISO certifications, impressive management profiles, etc. may look good tool as first level of filters in due-diligence process. However, I personally don’t feel them as only tool for due deligence, specially in Indian conditions and that to for small law firms. It is because ultimate target of outsourcing is to have cost reduction as much as possible without compromise in quality and number of small law firms, although don’t spend on good looking websites, ISO certifications, etc. but they have abilities and expertise to provide quality services. Hence, to assess capabilty of an LPO vendor, giving them pilot projects can be a good tool.

Train people: No one knows more about the style and nuances better than the person who intends to outsource, so the best teacher for people who work for him is only he. The best way is to ask for the persons, who will be working and then train the team on law, research and analysis, drafting, etc. Further, make sure that LPO vendor respects the fact that much effort in training is spent and that intellectual property is not used beyond what is permited. Also, make sure and help LPO vendor to retain the people trained.

Increase the skill of the people: Just as the coaching job does not stop at the initial training when one hire in his own country, having a resource offshore is no different. Conduct constant feedback sessions for the people who work. Such sessions don’t have to be elaborate: inline comments, regular teleconferences and occasional video-conferences, if both your vendor and you have access to, are enough. Begin with low complexity work for the offshore resources and over time (few months or as applicable) increase the complexity of the work. For example, if you are a patent prosecution lawyer, begin by asking the vendor to conduct searches, gradually moving the writing the more descriptive sections and over a longer period of time moving to claims drafting.

Meet the LPO Vendor: Physically seeing LPO vendor or his resources may not be often possible always. But do it whenever possible. As a matter of providing a tip for doing that, I can suggest to combine an Asian vacation with a day’s visit to the LPO vendor’s premises. Speak to the team often. Form a relation; it matters a lot to Indian people if you ask about their family, interests and aspirations.

Legal Personnel Shopping: This isn’t a common form of practice in the LPO industry at present, but I think it to be a good idea if an arrangement can be made where the people who work for the outsorcer can be trained at outsourcer’s location for sometime and then sent back to the vendor’s location but dedicated for the work for a committed period of time. This notion worked very well for IT companies and their western clients in the 90s. It boosts productivity, reduces costs and helps increase the complexity of work that you can get done offshore.
Be nice: Give references to the LPO vendor, if you like them. Doing so will make the LPO vendor always respect once work and demands. Seeing friends benefit from LPO, a notion that one introduced to them, will only make the one popular and respected!

Do remember, persistence pays, so don’t give up because an experiment or two failed. Happy Offshoring.

LPO Growth– Why India

Now that the time has come to begin the journey towards proving legal fraternity feel good and relaxed with outsourcing support and research work to offshore locations like India. Everyone must have heard about India. But, contrary to the notions one may have, India is no longer the land of snake charmers and there are other modes of transport than elephants! As it was known-to-be in the last millennium, India is an economy powered by knowledge. There are enough Indian minds that are agile enough.

Everyone knows that over the past few years, India has become the destination for knowledge driven industries and call-centers. IT outsourcing was the first to pick up and there now exist behemoth Indian companies in that space. There is a grand range of activities getting outsourced, from call centers to animations, from payroll to architecture design. Somewhere in that spectrum lies the legal process outsourcing.

It’s not that India has become most favorite destination for legal process outsourcing, without any reason.

Talented English knowing Legal Professionals:

If we try to find the critical reasons that enable the Indians to serve low to medium complexity western legal work, we find the common law background of the country’s own legal system and that most Indians study in what are known as “English-medium” schools i.e. schools where the medium of instruction is English. And given the fact that the great Indian middle class lays an almost inordinate amount of stress on the importance of education, there are enough kids who are good and on being grown up become very competent people capable enough to provide good quality work.

Good Internet Connectivity with lower cost:

In past few years, the international bandwidth situation has improved dramatically with the launch of India's first private undersea cable. Moreover, considerable bandwidth is also available to LPOs and other service providers through Tata Group owned Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited-VSNL. VSNL has strategic stakes and has negotiated contracts to use parts of several international cables like SEA-ME-WE II, SEA-ME-WE III(40 GBPS capacity), FLAG (10 GBPS capacity) and SAFE (40 GBPS capacity) offering connectivity to most locations around the world. Other operators in India also have aggressive plans to build undersea cable with considerable bandwidth over the next 2-3 years. Besides, the privatization of NLD operations within India has resulted in the emergence of new players. The privatization of the telecom Industry and Foreign Investment has resulted in significant drop in telecom rates.

Everyone whether a big corporation, a law firm or a solo attorney can be a part of the growth story of legal process outsourcing. Go offshore! This doesn’t mean that one need to move to India himself but rather that one may think about having some people work for him and build his work become increasingly competitive and profitable at the same time.

Outsourcing Legal Research and Writing

As legal process outsourcing (LPO) continues to expand in market share, so too the number and type of services offered by LPOs. The various types of legal support services that can be outsourced are varied and diverse as the legal market itself. The concept of LPO being at nascent stage, most LPO providers offer a wide array of legal support services - a one window solution for all type of services. But as the industry grows further, it is expected that LPOs will differentiate themselves not only by size and capabilities, but also by what area of law or what type of services they are best suited to outsource.

Earlier, there were trend to outsource low end work like para-legal services, deposition summaries, etc. But with the growth of LPO industry many LPOs including G. P. Law Solutions have developed itself for providing high end skilled services like Legal research and writing. Legal research and writing services encompass both drafting research memorandums as well as drafting legal pleadings like trial motions, briefs in support, appellate briefs, writs, etc.

Both small law firms as well as big law firms alike can benefit from the cost and time advantages of outsourcing Legal research and writing. By taking advantage of a global work-force, they can not only save time and money but also realistically expect high quality work product.

Why Outsource Legal Research and writings?

Since Law is anything but simple and clear, legal research and writing time-consuming and difficult. A good quality effective legal research and writing requires both efficiency and thoroughness. Usually it is seen that an attorney have to research an issue number of times before he feels comfortable with the result of his research.

Legal Research also requires adequate tools including Lexis® or Westlaw® to be effective and efficient. These tools are expensive, and often they are not used frequently enough to justify the expense for many law firms.

How LPOs successfully provide high quality Legal Research services

LPOs operating from India or other offshore locations can effectively manage Legal Research and writing projects and can effectively control quality through appropriate training from the outsourcing US law firms. Due to the complex nature of the work, many a times, in first month of legal research outsourcing appropriate result may not be achieved. But, as offshore attorney develops themselves with the training provided, certainly quality product with cost and time advantage comes at place.

A robust training program for all employees of the LPO is essential. Any LPO claiming to provide high quality Legal Research and writing services must have a strong training process and a well developed curriculum for training. Many LPOs including G. P. Law Solutions have full-time trainers dedicated to training attorneys in US law. However, G. P. Law Solutions always remains open if outsourcing law firm wishes to train attorneys in their own way and demands those trained attorneys for their exclusive work.

An LPO offering Legal Research and writing services must have a work-flow process that effectively leverages technology and synthesizes the offshore team’s capabilities with that of the US team. The work-flow process must take into account the time difference between the two teams, as well as the time sensitive nature of most projects.

Checklist to evaluate an LPO’s providing Legal Research and writing Services

• Is the LPO have appropriate training program and whether they are open to further training provided by the outsourcing law firm
• Does the LPO have an easy and believable work-flow process?
• What are qualifications of their attorneys?
• Whether LPO is ready to part some of its staff exclusively for the projects of outsourcing Law firm?
• How does the LPO gather data for its research projects?

Small Law Firms providing Legal Process Outsourcing – An Overview

Whenever Legal Process Outsourcing is talked about, attention concentrates on the 5-10 big guns of the industry. But, I think on proper study of complete LPO industry one will definitely find that at least 60% of total revenue of LPO industry is spread over small scale sector. However, target clients outsourcing the projects know little about such small law firms providing legal process outsourcing services.
Recent trend in industry seems to be that small conventional law firms procure some tech savvy professionals including lawyers, chartered accountants, doctors and engineers to form its Legal Process Outsourcing Department. They are able to provide vide range of services including litigation related document review, legal transcription, scanning & indexing of evidence in litigation cases, legal research, etc.
Generally, such small law firms provides their services to US & UK based solo attorneys, small law firms and legal departments of small companies, who get energized to outsource their jobs as either they themselves are too small to hire big guns Legal Process Outsourcing industry or they don’t have regular and large projects to outsource.
Such small law firms are capable enough to provide legal process outsourcing services at approx. 20-25 % cheaper rates than that of big names in LPO industry. Another big advantage of those small law firms is that they are competent enough to provide legal process outsourcing services in customized way. In other words, besides their standard service they are always ready to work on clients specific requirements thereby developing new product and services. Small law firms are more flexible on final product than that of big legal process service providers.
It is seen that such small law firms providing legal process outsourcing services begins with personal network based marketing. But, as they work for some considerable period, they become confident of growing further with complete satisfaction of old as well as new clients. Then those legal process outsourcing service providers transform their network based marketing approach to business-needed marketing approach. That’s where the growth comes in to their way.
US & UK based clients who use to outsource their projects sometimes hesitate with hiring such small law firms for the first time because of mainly quality issue. But in many cases, by doing so, they loose quality wise equivalent products being offered at more competitive rates. In my opinion, they must understand that cost-advantage without compromise on quality is the essence of outsourcing. Hence, they must take a chance by assigning projects to small law firms.
Although, hiring small law firms blindly can never be suggested. I would suggest that US & UK based clients intending to outsource may enquire about the partners and employees of the small law firm during initial discussions so that they may have some idea about their potential capabilities. Further, previous sample work may be seen. Besides, small firms are always ready to work on trial basis, which is the best way to assess potential capabilities.

Legal Process Outsourcing – Overview with attention to new challenges on its growth

After much debate on success of Legal Outsourcing, it has gone a long journey and reached to approx. US $ 100 Million industry, which is expected to grow further. But as every rose has bushes too, this shining industry has its own challenges. Those challenges may be in form of various kind of liabilities or others like procuring trained skilled associates, defending critiques from the nation Legal work is outsourced, etc.
The concept of LPO is derived primarily in order to reduce legal overheads by using lower paid professionals for work instead of using in-house attorneys and thereby sharpening competitive edge and increasing profitability. Hence, A LPO Vendor has an obvious and big liability towards the Outsourcer, who outsources his work, for delivering quality finished work at lowest possible price. It is because no outsourcer would be interested in off-souring at the cost of quality of finished work. And on the other hand, if the outsourcer has no cost advantage, he will not be in position to outsource.
It is being seen that in India more and more new LPO is opening day by day or conventional law firm launches their LPO unit. In fact LPOs have revolutionized the Legal practice in India and this fact can’t be denied. But in order to continue its growth, I think we as Legal Process Service Provider should be more and more vigilant towards the requirement of our clients who outsources their work to us.
In my opinion they are very much concerned for -
· Quality of the finished work
· Secrecy and Confidentiality of their Client’s Information
· Cost Advantage
For secrecy and confidentiality of client’s information we don’t allow our employees to bring any recordable device in the office. Further, the computer on which the employees work doesn’t have hard drive and they have to work directly on server. Additionally, all the activities are monitored through CCTV. Also, employees have to sign confidentiality agreement which makes them liable on their default. I think other LPO vendors also take similar measures.
For providing quality finished work most LPO vendors including us appoint talented Law graduates and train them appropriately so that they have better understanding of US or UK law. Besides initial training, ongoing regular training continues so that their skill may be improved more and more.
In my opinion in days to come, our LPO industry will have to face big blow in the front of cost advantage. It is because, in past few years, increasing employee remuneration is being used by number of LPO venders as tactic to retain trained employees. This will result in increased cost and thereby reduced cost advantage to the outsourcers. Hence, I think instead of blindly increasing employee remuneration, LPO vendors should try other alternative options to retain trained employees.
In my opinion, the best way to retain quality employees for long; thereby gaining maximum utility of training expenses is to motivate employees through other non monetary measures of employees’ welfare schemes and providing good working environment. Such measures play a big role in motivating employees towards work thereby LPO can attain big targets with quality. Added advantage of those measures is that they are cost effective. In this regard, we may learn from working of TATA group. Although, they are not in LPO, but they way they have developed pool of motivated employees, through employees’ welfare measures is great.