Litigation is a rather intricate and expensive process that requires a lot of effort on the part of support staff. While the real job of a law firm or attorney is to present the case in front of the court and win justice for the client, the background work usually takes a lot of time and resources and hinders the core activity. Legal practices that want to concentrate on their core work instead of spending their valued time and resources on peripheral processes are always on the lookout for qualified professionals who can take care of legal support services.
Processes such as legal drafting, deposition summary writing, e-discovery, document management, legal research, etc. come under the purview of legal support. Finding and hiring resources who can take care of all this work is not only difficult, but also cost-prohibitive. In such a scenario, it makes great business sense to outsource legal support services to a legal process outsourcing (LPO) company. This business decision not only absolves you of the daunting task of finding the right resources, but also gives you a host of benefits that eventually take your legal practice to the next level. Let’s find out what these benefits are:
No dearth of talent
No matter how small or big a legal firm you are, finding the right skill sets to take care of your legal support services is always a challenge for you. First of all, qualified legal resources like researchers, contract drafting experts, paralegals are absorbed by the industry and bound by stringent contracts. If you go for campus hiring campaigns, it costs a fortune to employ good resources from reputed law schools. Even if you manage to hire the requisite talent, you have to further spend on their training and skill enhancement. In a nutshell, it is extremely difficult for legal firms to find and hire the right talent. But in the case of outsourcing, it is not a problem at all. All you have to do is give your specific requirement to the LPO company and they will provide you with bespoke skill sets.
Especially in a country like India, where thousands of law graduates complete their degrees every year, there is no dearth of talent. In addition, the jurisprudence in India is the same as western countries, which means that the legal support staff that you hire understands your law and legal system. Being an erstwhile British colony, the medium of instruction here is English; so language will not be a problem at all.
Cost-saving by labor arbitrage
Though outsourcing is no longer all about cost-saving, it still saves you a lot of your hard-earned revenue in the form of labor arbitrage. While a local resource may charge you anywhere between 100 to 150 dollars per hour, at a remote location like India, you can hire the same skill-sets at half the cost. This is mainly because the currency in third world countries is much cheaper than the first world countries like the US, UK, Australia, and Canada etc. Another factor that works in your favor is the large scale availability of well-qualified lawyers and other legal resources. In addition to this, you don’t have to spend a dime on office space, software, hardware and employee benefits like insurance. All these factors enable you to save precious dollars.
Flexibility and scalability
Outsourcing, in general, has come of age and LPO is not an exception. Today it gives you a lot of flexibility and scalability in hiring remote legal resources. It is advisable to go for a vendor that provides you with maximum leeway to choose your resources. Well established vendors allow you to start with a single resource working exclusively for you from their remote office. This working relationship is just like having your own offshore office at zero cost; you only pay a monthly fee for the legal resource. Such vendors also give you the flexibility to increase or decrease the size of your remote team as per your fluctuating requirements. This flexibility and scalability eventually translates into more savings for you.
Quick turnaround time
If you depute your in-house staff to take care of legal support services, delivery deadlines keep shifting due to a number of factors. At times, you have to respond to an urgent hearing and end up pulling out the lawyers from an ongoing task. But in outsourcing, the vendor is bound by a service delivery agreement and they have to get the work done within the stipulated time frame. Besides, as delivering customized services is their bread and butter they make sure that every deadline is adhered to.
Final words
Staying ahead of the competition in the world of litigation is a tough task. To attend to your core business of delivering justice to your clients, you need to have a streamlined process to manage the back office work. While doing everything on your own eats into your productive time and resource, outsourcing gives you bespoke services within a quick turnaround time. This business practice also saves you a lot of money and frees up productive time for you. All these factors make outsourcing a valuable proposition for you. If you want to leverage outsourcing to bolster your market position in the litigation arena, SunLexis is your one-stop solution for a complete suite of legal support services. For more information on our services drop a line at info@sunlexis.com.