LPO – Advantages and Disadvantages

Legal Process Outsourcingr
Legal Process Outsourcing is a one stop facility providing legal support from multiple delivery centers. It is a customer focused organization that lends legal help/assistance strictly adhering to the rules and confidentiality of the firm on quite reasonable cost.
Advantages and disadvantages of legal outsourcingr
Top American law firms sustain and support that there is no denial that now-a-days outsourcing is becoming an essential part of legal proceedings owing to cost, time and burden. Today legal outsourcing is the biggest phenomenon that affecting the Indian Legal Industry. But in literal sense of term, what advantages and disadvantages does it bear. View all the pros and cons before opting for outsourcing.
Advantages
• Substantial cost reduction: In America and European countries engaging even an untrained lawyer hired for legal proceedings incurs high costs vis-à -vis a trained lawyer in India. This initiates law firms to higher an offshore legal outsourcing vendor to get the outsourcing done. A vendor would work 24 hours a day and that too on affordable cost. Reduced labor cost means increased profit margins to the end clients. Besides infrastructure costs are also lower in India.
• Round the clock time: Then comes the reason of time zone. Off shoring also enables organizations to take advantages of multiple shifts and time zone advantages, which is especially important for contracts, legal research, electronic document management, document discovery, and in situations with strict deadlines. The 12-hour time difference between the U.S. and India permits 24/7 operations.
• Ability to send overflow work : Lesser number of attorneys often raise the situation of “Legal Famine” . Due to heavy work load and shortage of time, the firms are unable to complete the projects within stipulated time period. Realizing the terseness of the situation, the firm than hand over their work to legal outsourcing vendors. Such firms usually benefit a great deal by sending overflow work to offshore providers, who can give a large number of reasonably experienced professionals with the right domain expertise at a reasonable cost. This can also help small and mid-size law-firms level the playing field because it allows them to compete more effectively with larger US-based law-firms.
• Highly qualified legal team: A highly qualified legal team to get the work done in lesser time.
• Reducing the Law-Associate Churn: Junior associate chu
and flexibility is one feature that inclines the firms towards outsourcing. Law-associates' churn occurs when junior lawyers switch from one law firm to another or when they open their own law firm. The intermixing of these law associate is a threat to firm’s confidentiality where its competitor could be benefited. Further if a law associate as his own client, his departure shall also affect the firms competitor. Hence, it is not surprising that most law-firms invest a substantial amount of resources in reducing such churn. Indeed, the off shoring of various legal and paralegal processes can help in lowering this churn because the senior lawyers in the firm would need fewer junior lawyers.
• Seamless process migration: This is flawless procedure movement, which helps law firms to get the quality work.
Disadvantages
A Dun and Bradstreet survey revealed that almost a quarter of outsourcing relationships fail in the first two years, and half fail within five years. Below are a few drawbacks to legal outsourcing:
• Cultural Differences: Off shoring work to foreign markets introduces cultural and language barriers that could hinder communications between onshore and offshore teams.
• Confidentiality: Outsourcing sensitive legal information across the globe gives overseas vendors access to confidential information. Some people contend that sending legal work overseas forms a waiver of the attorney–client privilege because the U.S. government monitors cross-border communications, and foreign countries lack the privacy rights given by the U.S. Constitution.
• Communication Barriers: Many outsourcing ventures fail because of unclear expectations, poor vendor responsiveness, a lack of understanding and ineffective governance. Companies with multi-shore operations must dedicate time and resources to managing the offshore relationship, diverting attention from core business functions.
• Hidden Costs: In some instances, hidden costs undermine the cost benefits of outsourcing work overseas. Hidden costs include vendor management, quality control, contract management, employee turnover, vendor profit margins and increased operational costs.
• Geographical Hurdles: Relinquishing control of complex legal processes to a party across the globe can result in a loss of managerial control over people and processes. The practice of employing remote workers also can increase certain costs such as travel and training.