Legal Process Outsourcing : An introduction

Outsourcing is subcontracting a process, such as product design or manufacturing, to a third-party company. Outsourcing involves the transfer of the management and/or day-to-day execution of an entire business function to an external service provider. Enter the new millennium, and law firms were sleek, new age hubs of strenuous legal activity, ranging from tedious to investigative to groundbreaking. Gradually, as world economy harmonized as one, and the global business community started outsourcing its key, albeit repetitive processes to reduce costs, time, effort, and manpower, the legal world developed too.

Present day economics is governed by technological growth where advanced communication systems rule the roost. Information technology has shrunk time and distance to such an extent that geographical boundaries are mere contours instead of dividers. Following in the wake of the financial world, the legal firms across the globe realized that to adapt themselves to the constantly evolving, competitive, economic scenario, they would have to develop strategies that would balance not only their deadlines but also provide efficient support systems. This brought about the evolution of Legal Process Outsourcing industry, where law firms obtained legal support services from key service providers, who were located halfway across the globe. Initially legal outsourcing involved low-end work like transcription. But soon the outsourcing pattern evolved to such specialized tasks as legal research, library services, pre-litigation document creation, consultation, application drafting, analysis, and so on. In the current scenario, approximately 80 per cent of companies, federal agencies, and leading law firms, opt for legal process outsourcing to reduce high operational costs and improve efficiencies.

There is some point indicating on the drawbacks of legal outsourcing and offshoring. There is a strong public opinion regarding outsourcing (especially when combined with offshoring) that outsourcing damages a local labor market. Outsourcing is the transfer of the delivery of services which affects both jobs and individuals. It is difficult to dispute that outsourcing has a detrimental effect on individuals who face job disruption and employment insecurity; however, its supporters believe that outsourcing should bring down prices, providing greater economic benefit to all. There are legal protections in the European Union regulations called the Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of Employment). Labor laws in the United States are not as protective as those in the European Union. A study has attempted to show that public controversies about outsourcing in the U.S. have much more to do with class and ethnic tensions within the U.S. itself, than with actual impacts of outsourcing.

Protections for the outsourcing firms can certainly be put into place. First and foremost, the contract between provider and client should make it absolutely clear that the provider must inform the client as soon as it learns of any possible conflict issues. Second, the firm should make sure that the provider it chooses is able to clearly articulate - and, if possible, demonstrate - the security safeguards it has implemented to ensure the validity of the process. These safeguards should be included in the statement of work agreement, in list format, along with the additional provision that the security devices must be maintained for the breadth of the contract. Thus determination of liability of the contracting parties for any security breach that results in measurable damages will be easier to ascertain. Third, due to the fact that technology and business procedures must often become intertwined in order for the outsourcing process to run efficiently, the security program used by the vendor should exist on both the physical and virtual levels for it to be as comprehensive as possible. It would be somewhat contradictory for an outsourcing company to rely on the fact that the production staff for two adverse law firms exists in separate offices, on separate floors or even in different cities. The very premise behind the outsourcing process is that physical separation is not a complete bar to the sharing of information - as such, a company cannot on one hand praise the concept that geographical differences are no longer barriers to the exchange of information and data, while relying strictly on geographical barriers as the only security measures put in place by the company. There is no doubt that physical separation of the production staff for adverse businesses is a good step; however, virtual separation is needed as well in order to create a robust security model.

By all this we can conclude that legal process outsourcing has tried to overcome with the financial problems in the country and and has great impavt on the common people. The legal complexity and great fees of lawyers have been minimized by this. As everything has two aspect, one is of good and other is of bad, it has also some drawbacks, like data security, productivity etc., but on a whole it is a great initiative in legal field and has changed the Legal age.