Important steps for outsourcing legal services

Practice of a law firm obtaining legal support services from a third party service provider is referred as Legal outsourcing .While outsourcing legal services,you need to consider different steps.

Outsourcing” is an often heard term in IT era.
I met my friend yesterday after a long gap; we went to see movies, ate food together, traveled the whole city and at last, were tired and started discussing about our life.

He is working in one of the fortune 500 companies, and shares a better position there in the financial wing. He described me about the processes being done there and the experiences he had with his recent outsourcing initiative.
He said that, they deal in products and have a lot of legal documents to work upon. Being a large company with over 20,000 employees it is too hard to manage their records, products and calculations. The firm decided to outsource its legal work to a third party provider rather than requiting more people. This was the second time they were outsourcing it after their bitter experience from first outsourcing.

The firm they chose first for Legal process outsourcing was not capable to fulfill their needs. They then shifted to another one by considering all the mistakes they made while selecting the first. He explained me different steps that I should take care if I have a plan for “legal outsourcing” in future.

I would like to discuss some of them with you.

1. Search: Search has the top most priority among the different factors to be considered for a better outsourcing selection. You can search either online or offline for the different outsourcing providers for LPO. But the best method would be online method as you will be able to judge the capability through small tests.

2. Selection and addition: After all the providers have been searched. The next step would be to sort them according to their services.

3. Pilot project: prepare a short pilot project and time that would be able to judge the capability of the firm. You must take care that the firm gets sufficient time to finish the project at its best. Try to give the toughest part that you think would be hard to do during worst circumstances. This is necessary as it will make you confident that you do not need to mingle into the processing part and can trust on the output.

4. Preparation of documents: Also preparing instructions is as important as preparing pilot. Provide ample instructions that enable the company to work upon. It should be easily understandable. Also take care to avoid certain sentences that you feel adds a bond to the document. Let the firm working on it come with doubts. This clarifies that they are open to discussions and understanding ideas.

5. Allocation of “legal outsourcing pilot”: the next step would be to mail all the selected service providers with pilot project and the documents. Tell them to go through the documents as a reference for the work and to complete the project at the specified time.

6. Testing output: After the output is returned from individual providers let it go through rigorous checking and advise the mistakes to them and shortlist the providers who meet the final output quality.

7. Costing: If the outputs are received, ask all the short listed legal outsourcing service providers to quote their price. Depending upon the quotes received from the provider’s shortlist the one having better quality and average price.


It is advised to negotiate price and consider a higher price if quality is best. This will help you and avoid future problems when the actual work starts.

Article by Remya Rajesh
SBL BPO Services
http://www.saibposervices.com/Outsourcing_for_Legal_Projects.aspx
Legal process outsourcing