When it comes to running a successful law firm, efficiency, accuracy, and cost-effectiveness are paramount. When don’t have the time, manpower or resources to complete your routine, daily tasks, it can impact your operations significantly. Legal process outsourcing (LPO) is a practical strategy to tackle various time-consuming, non-core tasks cost-effectively while you focus on higher-value activities.
So, let’s take a look at why LPO is a smart approach to enhance your legal operations and what processes you can benefit from outsourcing.
Why Consider Outsourcing Legal Processes?
Any business must be agile to effectively cater to its clients without facing extra costs or time-consuming administrative burdens. For law firms, agility is critical to effectively manage the unpredictable nature of legal proceedings, stay competitive in the face of challenges, and meet client needs swiftly. Partnering with an LPO provider allows you to leverage their expertise to streamline your processes and achieve these goals cost-effectively.
Legal processes can be done in-house. It would give you greater control over what’s happening and you can keep an eye on quality. Also, it would give your employees feel a part of your success and boost their morale. But the flip side is increased costs. Building in-house teams trained to perform various tasks such as document coding and management, legal research, litigation, coding and more can be very expensive and time-consuming. Partnering with an LPO service with the necessary expertise would ensure all the solutions you need under one roof – no need for full-time hires!
One of the major advantages of outsourcing is flexibility. LPO providers can adapt swiftly to your changing needs. Whether it’s handling a sudden influx of documents or scaling down during quieter periods, they can accommodate these changes. They can also customize their services to suit specific tasks or phases within the legal process.
Having the right assistance can be instrumental in broadening your knowledge across diverse legal domains. With access to valuable resources, you could expand your expertise in different areas of law and meet client needs without having to hire full-time employees.
An experienced legal process outsourcing company can complete your tasksefficiently and in an economical way, saving you time and money. Their support also allows you to take on additional work from new or existing clients, increasing your income and profits without extra investments.
Four Legal Processes to Outsource
There is an endless list of potential activities your firm could outsource.
Here are four options:
Document Review and eDiscovery
Document review and e-discovery processes are a great example of LPO applicability. For instance, suppose your law firm is handling a complex litigation case. Opting for legal process outsourcing services can ease the job of combing through, sorting and analyzing relevant data and documents. For extensive document review projects, consider selecting an LPO that can provide a comprehensive solution covering the entire e-discovery process-from data collection and processing to hosting, review, and production of electronic data. Experts streamline the process using cutting-edge tools, significantly reducing your time and costs associated with document review and ediscovery.
Document Management
Struggling with loads of documents? Searching and hunting paper or digital files spread across repositories and silos can be a major hassle even for small law firms. An LPO provider can help you implement an efficient electronic document management solution for storing, organizing, securing, capturing, digitizing, tagging documents. Benefits include centralized storage, multi-user access, document versioning, secure sharing, access on the go anytime, anywhere, and searchable files.
Legal Research
It can take hours of research to identify and find the laws – including statutes, regulations, and court opinions – to back up a legal argument you’re making in a motion or brief. Research is also necessary when you have to provide a client with accurate legal guidance. LPO experts can ensure your legal research is comprehensive. Outsourcing is cost-effective too as you pay only for the time it takes to complete your project.
Legal Document Coding
Reviewing complex legal documents such as contracts poses a challenge as they are usually full of jargon. Such documents not only require indexing but also custom data capture and subjective coding. Experts will systematically organize and categorize information within legal documents, assigning codes to help in easy retrieval, analysis, and reference during legal proceedings or document review. If you have a project that requires precise legal document coding, outsourcing services are the best option.
Making the Outsourcing Decision
Here are four situations where outsourcing makes sense for a law firm, according to Wolters Kluwer:
- There’s a strict deadline and lack of time or expertise to complete the task
- It is more cost-effective to get the work done externally than in-house
- There high-volume seasonal work
- Immediate expertise is required without a long-term commitment
To make the LPO decision, consider what tasks take up a lot of staff time, but don’t necessarily need to be completed in-house. Also, think about the legal processes that need improvement but would be too costly to handle in-house. Once you make the decision to outsource these tasks, choose a business process outsourcing company that specializes in LPO. Reliable companies offer a free trial to help potential client get an idea about their capabilities.
Unlock new efficiencies for your law firm with our support!
