Rise in the LPO sector and its success story:-
Introduction to LPO sector:-
It refers to the industry of in which the in-house legal departments or organizations outsource legal works from the areas where it is costly to perform. It is the practice of law firm or any corporation that help in obtaining legal support from an outside law firm. As these firms are based on other countries, they are called off shoring firms and the practice which they do is called as outsourcing.
Concept:-
Its conception is based on the division of labour principle that is prevalent in law firms where variety of time consuming and onerous processes like due diligence are delegated to paralegals, document reviewers or inters. This help by allowing the firms to address the various legal issues that arise on a daily basis being able to streamline productivity.
This process involves the deal with a contract between both the firms. There are various methods to establish relationship between both the firms that allows the initiation of the process which are as follows;-
- Direct contact:-
It is the most straight forward means of establishing contact. Here those firms which need legal services directly approach the legal process outsourcing vendor.
- Managed outsourcing:-
Here the firm establishes the contact with the legal process as well as maintains a traditional law firm that will help it in coordinating the vendors activities and ensure quality control.
- Required outsourcing:-
This is a mandatory contact that is established between the firms at certain levels in the legal process which may be either to reduce the costs or to fulfill the statutory requirement.
- Multi –sourcing:-
Here segregation of work is done and is assigned to LPO providers to reduce the risk of legal disturbances and take advantage of each provider’s strengths. This helps in cases where expertise is required on matters of jurisdiction and merits. If there are more than one service providers at a time then it allows the service recipient to obtain more favorable pricing and multi-sourcing can be more complicated than that of other approaches to provide strong and effective governance procedures.
Criticism:-
It is being said that people performing legal work may not be bound to necessary ethical standards. This LPO has come in to conflict with the model code of conduct issued by the American Bar Association. But there are ethics and opinions from various local bar associations and they discussed about the ethical legal outsourcing and planned how to achieve it.
Conclusion:-
It is a trend on the rise that provides both the multi- national corporation and law firm a range of benefits from improving operation to reducing costs. The pressure for these companies to outsource legal processes emanates from several sources. It ranges from low –level to high –level tasks and the decision that is provided by LPO as a challenge.