Benefits of outsourcing legal services for law firms
Outsourcing legal services allows lawyers and legal professionals to have more time to focus on their most significant work. Therefore, practicing law involves countless tasks that compete for your attention, and outsourcing is a great way to prevent being overworked.
Similarly, a legal service outsourcing company will take care of any repetitive, tedious operations taking up valuable time. In addition, legal process outsourcing services take these tasks off of your shoulders for an affordable price, allowing you to save time and money
In this article, you will learn everything there is to know about the benefits of outsourcing legal services and how this can positively impact your business while saving money and time.
- What is legal service outsourcing?
- What tasks can legal process outsourcing take over?
- Benefits of outsourcing legal services
- Tendencies for legal process outsourcing
- How to use legal service outsourcing?
- What to keep in mind before outsourcing?
- Are there any disadvantages of Legal Process Outsourcing?
- How can Connect Legal Help your business?
1. What is legal service outsourcing?
Legal service outsourcing is when a law firm uses a third-party service provider to execute various tasks and functions. In addition, a law firm can outsource any legal activity or task that does not require personal presence or contact.
Legal professionals and on-site teams want to focus their efforts on providing quality services to clients instead of having to manage laborious tasks while trying to lower the overall costs of services. Therefore, an off-site LPO can step in to handle responsibilities such as undertaking case research, writing legal documents among others.
A legal service outsourcing company will take care of any repetitive, tedious operations taking up valuable time. In addition, legal process outsourcing services take these tasks off of your shoulders for an affordable price, allowing you to save time and money.
2. What Tasks Can Legal Process Outsourcing Take Over?
Legal service outsourcing can execute a wide range of tasks and jobs. Furthermore, this allows your law firm to not waste any time on routine tasks that do not need to be completed in-house. Here are some of the tasks that legal process outsourcing can handle:
- Document Review
- E-Discovery
- Discovery (Subpoenas, RFPs, RROGs, RFAs)
- Legal Research
- Legal Writing
- Drafting Of Briefs
- Drafting Of Pleadings
- Appearance Counsel & Per Diems
- Patent Services
- Case Summaries
- Deposition Summaries
- Demand Letters
- Leases, Wills, & Trusts
- Corporate Documents
- Data Entry & Management
- Billing & Financial Services
3. Benefits of outsourcing legal services
Let’s take a look at some of the advantages of outsourcing legal work.
3.1 Cost-effectiveness
This is a key reason responsible for the rise in legal process outsourcing. Also, LPO provides a unique opportunity for law firms to access high-level expertise from offshore teams while staying within the budget.
In addition, you can also reduce long-term expenses incurred by hiring permanent staff, such as setting up additional office space. By offshoring, firms can accrue additional savings through labor arbitrage.
3.2 Access to latest technologies
Most LPO companies are already well-equipped with the latest AI-based solutions and IT support for e-Discovery, contract lifecycle management, and legal research. Also, law firms can enhance existing technology with collaborative digital operations and infrastructure that outsourcing offers.
3.3 Connections with experts and a skilled workforce
A good legal outsourcing partner will have a network of connections with general counsels and law firms worldwide. Therefore, small firms and solo legal professionals that wouldn’t normally have access to such global expertise at a local level can benefit from such services.
3.4 Reduced turnaround time
When it comes to priority legal projects, time is of the essence. Having both on-site and off-site teams working on the case around the clock will increase efficiency in completing demanding legal projects. Furthermore, one of the benefits of offshoring is the ability to circumvent time zones so that the projects can be completed ahead of time. For example, U.S. legal work outsourced to Dubai allows 24×7 availability, thereby extending productive business hours.
3.5. Improved focus on core operations
By outsourcing time-consuming legal tasks, your law firm can focus on core operations that will ultimately lead to a better client experience. Also, this can include attending trials and interacting with clients to understand cases better.
3.6 Enhanced customer service
Offshoring can help enhance customer service by allowing you to build a customer support platform that operates around the clock — from attending phone calls to responding to online live chats. In addition, the combination of in-house and off-site teams can help cater to various types of client needs that your business may not be able to handle all by yourself.
3.7 Expanded Practice Area
Law includes many types of practice areas and specialties that no one law firm can excel in. However, outsourcing some of your law services allows your firm to expand its practice area to serve more clients.
3.8 Create a Work-Life Balance
A healthy work-life balance is not easy for legal professionals to achieve. Therefore, legal work requires tremendous amounts of attention and hours that can negatively impact the quality of life. Outsourcing legal services allows these professionals to have a great balance between life and work.
3.9 Take on More Clients
Because outsourcing legal services saves time and increases efficiency, your law firm will be able to take on more clients without anything slipping through the cracks. Furthermore, the outsourcing company will execute tasks while focusing on creating relationships with your clients and other core matters.
4. Tendencies for legal process outsourcing
Keep in mind that outsourcing is technically defined as using resources outside the internal operations of a business to keep things running smoothly. Therefore, small firms, in particular, might find themselves slammed with a time-draining major case that will demand all hands on deck for a period. But, what happens to other clients while the entire in-house staff is focused on that one case? Outsourcing provides flexibility and costs savings over hiring additional staff to keep the firm up and running efficiently.
The benefits of legal service outsourcing have caused more and more law firms to turn to outsourcing to stand out against the competition. Below we have a list of the three main trends of legal process outsourcing indicating its growth.
4.1 Artificial Intelligence & Automation
Artificial intelligence (AI) and automation are a massive trend in outsourcing. Automated technology allows companies to maximize efficiency and streamline operations, which is why it is such a valuable asset to utilize. For example, AI for legal process outsourcing enables law firms to take on more clients.
4.2 Hybrid Outsourcing
Hybrid outsourcing refers to a combination of legal process outsourcing and offshoring. While legal process outsourcing relies on local legal professionals, offshoring uses overseas labor to complete tasks remotely and usually for the most cost-efficient price. Combining the two can give law firms comprehensive help.
4.3 E-Discovery
Electronically stored information like emails, calendar items, and voicemails have recently become accepted in litigation. Therefore, if your law firm is not efficient at identifying, collecting, or storing information from these devices, legal process outsourcing services can take care of it.
5. How to use legal service outsourcing?
Outsourcing for legal processes is lucrative and beneficial, but not all outsourcing providers operate the same. However, there are steps that you can take to ensure that you make the most of legal process outsourcing services. Here’s how to use legal process outsourcing to ensure success:
5.1 Evaluate Your Firm’s Needs
By determining your needs, you can find the perfect service provider to fulfill them.
5.2 Decide Which Tasks To Delegate
Outsourcing is all about delegation. So, it would help if you spent careful time deciding which tasks can and should be delegated to an external service provider. For example, you can ask which tasks are taking up valuable time, which tasks are not cost-efficient, and which tasks do not need to be completed in-house.
5.3 Assess Potential Providers
Once you know what legal services you need to have completed by an outsourcing company, you can assess potential providers. Make sure that you look for a provider that will do well to accomplish your firm’s goals.
5.4 Track & Measure Progress
The goal of legal process outsourcing is to help your law firm improve efficiency and expand capabilities. You should track and measure how well your legal process provider is meeting your needs and expectations. This ensures that you are not wasting any time or money on legal process outsourcing services.
5.5 Provide Feedback
Communication and feedback are paramount for a successful partnership with your legal service provider. One of the main aspects of using legal service outsourcing successfully is giving feedback on all services provided.
6. What to keep in mind before outsourcing
6.1 Hidden costs
While cost-effectiveness is one of the primary benefits of LPO, there can be hidden costs such as rising operating costs, employee turnover, and vendor profit margins that are usually overlooked. Law firms should make sure they get a detailed list of costs from the LPO partner.
6.2 Attorney-client privilege and confidentiality
Concerns about attorney-client privilege and data breaches inhibit lawyers from trusting a service provider. Do your research and background checks to ensure that the company has a track record of safeguarding confidential information. Also, check how communications between counsel and the LPO provider fall within the attorney-client privilege.
6.3 Local laws
Local laws may have stringent privacy policies and data protection laws, and the service provider and the purchaser are bound to share legal obligations. To avoid penalties, it’s recommended that law firms analyze a country’s local and international laws before choosing an offshore service provider.
7. Are there any disadvantages of Legal Process Outsourcing?
Well, LPOs provide some of the best services and it also gives you advantages but there are certain disadvantages also. Most law firms are very apprehensive about their confidential relationship with their clients, therefore they are reluctant to outsource their work. However, when it comes to Emiratis LPOs, they have certain stringent policies in place that safeguard the private information of clients.
Another disadvantage with LPOs that can stop from outsourcing work to LPOs is that there may be some hidden costs that are involved. Hidden costs may be added to the total costs of outsourcing. You can ask your service provider to give you the entire list of costs.
In conclusion, legal Process Outsourcing has numerous advantages that make it crucial not just for the big firms but also for small firms. The UAE has become one of the favorable destinations for legal work. It has a lot of scope for further expansion and growth.
8. How can Connect Legal help your business?
In Connect Legal, our team of experienced lawyers versed in the updated rules and regulations can help you solve all of your legal issues. Also, we can assist you on a variety of specific legal topics and understand your unique requirements to provide an excellent solution.
Similarly, we always spend time to understand the business type and the legal procedure which they should go through, and also, the litigation which may occur. Our team always guides our clients about the transactions involved in every process. And this transparency keeps the client educated about everything happening with the company.
In Connect Legal, we have experienced lawyers who have worked for different industries. We can also work with your in-house legal department when you want to track efficiency or when you need an expert to review the document prepared by them. The data and documents you share with us will be kept highly confidential.
Would you like to contact Connect Legal? You can call at +971 4331 6688 or send an email to [email protected], and you’ll talk to one of our representatives that will gladly answer all of your questions.
