Legal process outsourcing

Outsourcing services to offshore centres with skilled workforces (principally India and the Far East, but also South Africa and other countries) is not new. Business process outsourcing (BPO) of services such as data entry, typing, transcription, database management, typesetting and other low level functions has been common for years.

More recently, however, pressure on law firms to reduce costs has led to the outsourcing of paralegal tasks and the emergence of what is now known as legal process outsourcing (LPO) as accepted practice.

The range of legal processes that have been effectively outsourced by large law firms in the US and UK in recent years include legal transcription, database creation and maintenance, scanning and indexing evidence, document coding, document review and annotation, document processing and management, creation of forms and precedents, document drafting, legal research and patent drafting.

The majority of outsourced work is in the areas of complex litigation, mergers and acquisitions, insolvency, patents and compliance.

Choice of offshore centre

As to the choice of offshore centre for LPO, India in particular has significant advantages over other centres:

• India has a huge pool of graduates, schooled in English; further the Indian legal system is based on the English system.
• Not only can large teams of qualified personnel be applied to the task at hand, accordingly turning round projects rapidly, but also the time difference can translate to further speed gains as onshore and offshore teams can work sequentially literally for 24 hours a day.
• The direct cost of labour is a fraction of that in the UK, giving total cost savings of 50% or more.

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