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What do law firms look for while outsourcing legal processes?

Law firms thrive on their reputation: Reputation for quality of service, reliability, timeliness; and in defining and defending legal and contractual rights.

The relationship between a law firm and a client thrives on trust and transcends generations.

It is natural for law firms therefore not to place great emphasis on the attractiveness of reduction in cost of legal service by using global resources.

However, clients and law firms are under significant pressure to minimize cost of legal work.

The magic circle law firms have realized for quite some time that it is possible to keep professional work in home office with trusted partners and yet outsource basic legal and paralegal work to global resources for multiple reasons:

  1. Improvement in quality of work since the processes are often executed at global levels by lawyers; not paralegal resources.
  2. Improvement in turnaround time since global resources often work in different time zones and lawyers can expect work given in the evening to be completed and ready for review when they arrive into office in the morning.
  3. Reduction in cost by at least 70%.

In the last four years, many smaller law firms have started using global resources for basic legal and paralegal work. The engagements often start with global resources filling up information in standardized templates and building a document out of an approved list of clauses. After a while, there is a significant development of confidence and the work outsourced moves to a higher plane of free form drafting, legal research and litigation support. In one case, within 12 months a law firm client of TaurusQuest started asking our staff to write deposition summaries and do higher level legal research.

In outsourcing legal work, the key concerns law firms (big and small) have are:

  1. Management of conflict. LPO Service providers such as TaurusQuest are aware of the conflict management requirements and have strong procedures in place to ensure law firms do not get conflicted in representing their clients.
  2. Security and confidentiality: This is no more a major worry. LPO service providers such as TaurusQuest have very strong security/confidentiality policies and practices in place that conform to ISO 9001 Quality standards and ISO 27001 Information security standards.
  3. Quality of work: This continues to be a top concern for law firms. This is best addressed by choosing an outsourced service provider with the same care and concern with which a junior is recruited into the law firm. Law firms tend to start with low level paralegal work and migrate up to knowledge intensive work.
  4. Cost: This works in reverse. Law firms tend to be wary about very low cost providers. Managing legal processes is a knowledge intensive work and pursuing cost reduction opportunities benefits up to a point and backfires beyond that level

TaurusQuest’s experience in providing legal process services to law firms in the US is interesting. As a rule, the engagement process is very long. Much of the pre-engagement discussions are around credentials, quality of people, reliability and track record. Cost of service is often not a major issue, though TaurusQuest prices its services at levels where law firms can save as much as 70% of their costs by using TaurusQuest. The initial engagement is, as a rule, for management of contract templates. However, almost in every case, the service has migrated up the value curve.

Once there is stability in the relationship, discussions inevitably veer toward keeping price as low as possible. Who said negotiating with a lawyer is easy?

The LPO service providers need to recognize the emerging expectations and criteria of the law firms and in-house counsels to be able to create better value for clients and grow. It requires service providers to have a right mix of delivery models, be highly process oriented, technology enabled and be able to offer the right mix of resources at competitive prices.

TaurusQuest (www.taurusquest.com) provides legal process outsourcing services (such as contract management, litigation support, legal research and intellectual property rights) to law firms and in-house counsels in US. TaurusQuest understands the criticality of conflict management, and security/confidentiality practices. TaurusQuest is ISO 27001:2013 certified for information security management and ISO 9001:2015 certified for quality management. The innovative and flexible delivery models and domain expertise have been the key factors for TaurusQuest’s continued growth as a legal process service provider.

To find more about TaurusQuest, visit www.taurusquest.com or send an email to us at enquiry@taurusquest.com

The views expressed are that of the author’s and TaurusQuest is not responsible for the contents or the views expressed therein. If any part of this blog is incorrect, inappropriate or violates the IP rights of any person, please alert us at ceo@taurusquest.com. We would take immediate action to correct any violation.