Legal outsourcing is the latest movement catching up with the audience and following the tendency that many countries are going for India. Tough economic conditions bring pressure to cut the price of legal services and the simplest way of cutting costs is by allocating the work to cheaper suppliers. This is of particular interest to in-house lawyers who are already working to reduce their expenditure on external law firms while streamlining their own departments.
Both back office work and the front line provision of legal services can be outsourced and law firms are already outsourcing work such as word processing, graphics and design, accounting and IT. India is among the most popular current locations for this.
India having a large number of well-qualified English speaking lawyers adds to the world's largest supplier of outsourced legal services. Usually the junior Indian lawyers are less expensive to employ and Indian law firms have spotted this opportunity and set up their own outsourcing operations.
The outsourcing of legal service is challenging and many lawyers are intuitively uncomfortable with the idea that some of their work might be parceled out to third party providers but the reality is that much of the work that lawyers do today is relatively routine and does not need to be kept exclusively to traditional law firms.
Looking forward, it is unlikely that the ongoing efforts to reduce the costs of legal service will stop at outsourcing Just as outsourcing enables routine work to be done more cheaply, so too can technologies such as automatic document production and work flow systems.
Whereas outsourcing costs are likely to rise as a consequence of inflation in the more popular outsourcing locations in the coming years, in contrast, technology costs will tend to fall over time. Accordingly, those who are considering outsourcing should always investigate whether there is a technological alternative that may be less costly and allow lawyers and clients to avoid some of the tricky legal and regulatory obstacle
Both back office work and the front line provision of legal services can be outsourced and law firms are already outsourcing work such as word processing, graphics and design, accounting and IT. India is among the most popular current locations for this.
India having a large number of well-qualified English speaking lawyers adds to the world's largest supplier of outsourced legal services. Usually the junior Indian lawyers are less expensive to employ and Indian law firms have spotted this opportunity and set up their own outsourcing operations.
The outsourcing of legal service is challenging and many lawyers are intuitively uncomfortable with the idea that some of their work might be parceled out to third party providers but the reality is that much of the work that lawyers do today is relatively routine and does not need to be kept exclusively to traditional law firms.
Looking forward, it is unlikely that the ongoing efforts to reduce the costs of legal service will stop at outsourcing Just as outsourcing enables routine work to be done more cheaply, so too can technologies such as automatic document production and work flow systems.
Whereas outsourcing costs are likely to rise as a consequence of inflation in the more popular outsourcing locations in the coming years, in contrast, technology costs will tend to fall over time. Accordingly, those who are considering outsourcing should always investigate whether there is a technological alternative that may be less costly and allow lawyers and clients to avoid some of the tricky legal and regulatory obstacle
