Growing Legal Process Outsourcing - A Concern?

noreply@blogger.com (future of legal process outsourcing) — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 11:05:00 +0000

With the increasing number of small players entering the market, Legal Process Outsourcing Industry seems to be flooded with manpower! Will it meet the same fate as the BPO industry?

LPO industry, after navigating through a cold and lonely journey of about 5 years, has now crossed a $100mn mark! Just in about 3 years there has been an immense leap regarding the number of LPOs in the country, since by the virtue of confidence developed, industry players are all gearing up in foreign markets and there is definitely no stopping them! But the question arises, is their rapid growth a matter of concern? Will LPO industry too join the same empathy of BPO sector and get stabilized with this rapid influx!

My take on this is a strong “NO”. Most of normally tend to confuse between the LPO and BPO sector. The difference is much more than difference of alphabets-‘L’ and ‘B’. Legal outsourcing involves not just any ordinary job which can be done by any ordinary high school student. It thrives on a highly technical staff of lawyers and engineers who are solely responsible to execute all the work that is outsourced! So when the number of law graduates being churned out every year is stable, the industry, which is fast growing now, will stabilize after some point of time stabalise.
Secondly, legal documents and reviews outsourced are highly confidential in nature, so once a client is pitched in, normally he would hesitate to shift his loyalties to another firm due to matters of faith and confidentiality. So again, the growing LPO firms can make new clients but definitely not snatch away the existing clients from the established LPOs.

Hence LPOs are here to stay!

Legal Process Outsourcing

noreply@blogger.com (future of legal process outsourcing) — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 05:53:00 +0000

As you all know, most of the law firm in USA, Canada and UK are facing problems regarding the legal support staff. Particularly referring to small and mid-size firms who practice in the area of personal injury or class actions are the ones who are the major victims.

Law firms are believed to spend a lot of time and money in the discovery process whereas now any plaintiff firm can do this service likewise. Large firms benefit from outsourcing the administrative functions like word processing and document/coding. As the market becomes more competitive, larger firms will need the desire to look into outsourcing since much more of subjective work like- legal research, deposition summaries and document review to bypass the strong competition. And in a situation like this LPO is the need of the hour! They not only would compensate the difference of cost but would also generate job opportunities in places like India, which would further enhance our country profile when it comes to fighting the problem of unemployment.

So thinking on these lines, a big question arises? Is offshore Legal Process Outsourcing safe? Are they taking all necessary actions to safeguard the client data?

Since I personally work in a leading LPO, I would like to say from my experience that it is quite safe to invest faith in the work culture here. Our offices safeguard the confidentiality of their clients with the right measures. Moreover, in India, the first phase of establishing BPO, KPO and LPO is over. By analyzing first phase and after taking all necessary and desired course of action in this stage, the Indian Law fraternity is now in second stage of establishments and carving niches and relationships with their clients, where they have proved their worth. The staff in these law firms is well trained to work round the clock shifts, security measures are deployed and infrastructure is ready to take this legal process outsourcing influx like the latest sensex leap!