LPO or Legal Process Outsourcing refers to the process wherein law firms and legal corporations outsource their legal processes to an offshore service provider. Legal process outsourcing is also known as offshoring, onshoring, LPO, legal process offshoring, and legal process onshoring. Legal Support Services has firmly established its root in the mainstream corporate culture across the globe. This model enables the attorneys, paralegals and other legal experts to outsource their work to different vendors in their locality and abroad. It is increasingly becoming a popular strategy among law firms and corporate legal firms, who are relentlessly trying to reduce their operating cost and focus more on their core competencies. Economic changes, Globalization, and the growth of Internet are some of the major aspects that have fueled the growth of legal process outsourcing in today’s time. Several companies, regardless of their size are outsourcing legal services.
LPO firms make special efforts to meet their clients’ conditions by signing service-level agreements, employing foreign-trained lawyers to oversee the work, having strict recruitment policies, stringently implementing processes featuring six sigma techniques and providing data security guarantees.
Legal process outsourcing covers the following services in general:
- Contract Drafting Services
- Document Review
- Legal Research
- Legal Writing
- Paralegal Support
- Litigation Support
- Legal Data Entry
- Case management
Currently, India is the largest LPO destination for overseas firms. There are a number of economic, geographic, historical, legal, linguistic and political advantages to be reaped such as generous tax breaks, time differences, a well-educated and trained English-speaking workforce and a common law system similar to what is practised in the US and UK.
Hence, by choosing to outsource legal services to an external vendor will help in reducing the costs. Besides cost optimization, legal process outsourcing offers access to external talent, 24/7 support and the capability to scale up or down operations as and when required. LPO is occurring in nearly all sectors of the legal industry. The work of lawyers, paralegals, legal secretaries and litigation support personnel is increasingly being performed by legal service providers on the other side of the globe.
