Legal Services

Legal process outsourcing can be a significant cost-saving measure. Instead of dedicated internal resources, discrete legal services are transferred to external companies, local lawyers, or paraprofessionals. Think about all the mundane routine tasks that can be done by outside help. You can leverage the strength of other experts to save time, cut costs, and reduce your workload. This allows you to focus on what you do best. In other words, bringing in new business for your firm and offering top service to existing clients.

To make practicing law more profitable, it’s important to really understand and use your strengths. Unfortunately, running a law firm, just like any business, involves plenty of tasks that compete for your attention. This is where legal process outsourcing can be leveraged. There are plenty of professional outsourced legal services available, as well as freelance lawyers, and lower-cost practitioners.

The Difference between Legal Process Outsourcing and Offshoring

A common point of confusion arises from the word “outsourcing”. So, it’s important to recognize the distinction between legal process outsourcing and offshoring. Below are brief definitions. Legal process outsourcing is using local lawyers and professionals to take on certain tasks like document review, scanning, and non-substantive court appearances.

Offshoring is the process of employing cheap overseas labor to complete tasks remotely.

5 Benefits of Legal Process Outsourcing For Law Firms

At its core, legal process outsourcing is a convenient way to increase capacity, focus on the strengths of your law firm, and increase profitability. In fact, 62.1% of law firms in the 2019 Altman Weil Survey report that shifting work to contract lawyers “resulted in significant improvement in firm performance.”

The top five benefits to legal process outsourcing for law firms include:

1. Expanding your practice area expertise.

There are so many different types of law practice that your law firm can’t be an expert in all fields. By outsourcing specific law services to contract lawyers, you meet all the needs of your clients without having to hire a full-time employee.

2. Enabling flexible staffing for your client cases.

Freelance attorneys provide their services only when your law firm needs the help. By going freelance, you can find qualified legal help at any skill level for any kind of project or case. And a bonus? Hiring a lawyer in a freelance capacity is a great way to try out the working relationship before committing to a full-time hire.

3. Moving towards flat-fee billing.

Outsourcing via LAWCLERK lets you engage talented lawyers to assist you with discrete projects or entire cases on a flat-fee basis. You can charge your clients a set fee or provide blended fee caps for legal work. Learn more about law firm billing in our comprehensive guide.

4. Lower the cost of your legal services.

LAWCLERK, for example, doesn’t charge its users any sign-up or monthly fees just to be a part of the marketplace. You only pay the flat fee price you set when you hire a freelance lawyer through the site. In the end, your clients benefit from these savings.

5. Finding work-life balance.

Solos and firms are under more pressure than ever to work constantly to make a profit. Freelance lawyers bring in extra help when you need it, without the overhead of a full-time associate. Use the extra time to recharge with your friends, family, and hobbies.

What outsourced legal services are the most beneficial to a law firm?

There’s a seemingly endless list of potential activities your firm could outsource. In addition, new companies are constantly coming onto the market that provides innovative ways to outsource.

To determine the best outsourcing companies for you, consider the following:

1. Evaluate your firm’s needs.

There are plenty of options when it comes to legal process outsourcing. However, not all of them will be useful to your firm. A good way to start is to ask yourself these questions:

What tasks take up a lot of staff time, but don’t necessarily need to be completed in-house?
Does the person need to be physically in your office? Do you need someone to go to court? Is remote working acceptable?

2. Explore outsourcing legal work options that match your needs.

Once you understand the areas for improvement within your law firm, identify the numerous legal process outsourcing companies available. If costs are a significant concern, consider outsourcing legal services where vendors can provide flat fees versus hourly rates.

Advantages of Legal Process Outsourcing

1) Huge Cost Savings

As mentioned before, outsourcing legal work will save you a fortune that you can use in improving other aspects of your business or hiring staff in other departments that need more workers. Outsourcing will give the highest quality work for the least costs, what’s there to hate?

With the availability of skilled labor, you can cut down your operating costs to as much as half. And don’t worry, these lawyers are making more than enough to live, using the difference in wages between locally and in countries like India is a good tactic that has been used by a lot of firms and has proven to be successful.

2) 24/7 Support

By outsourcing LPO services, you will be able to get legal support at any time of the day, you will always have attorneys that are ready to help you or provide you with what you need depending on the time zone you are based in. Our attorneys are trained and ready to help you in the time you need. By utilizing the time zones difference you will be able to have your projects worked on 24 hours a day.

3) Access to External Talent

Outsourcing legal research work to external firms allows your organization to access a higher level of talent and niche expertise that won’t exist within your firm. This happens a lot, for example: litigation firms might lack litigation support expertise so they may end up outsourcing certain aspects of litigation support such as document reviewing and coding to niche providers.

Access to external talent is really useful for small firms to fill gaps in internal competencies. Legal work outsourcing also allows firms to tap into global expertise. Global expertise will be motivated and highly trained to handle all your legal work and will be ready for any consult.

4) Reduced Turnaround Time

The use of external attorneys and external talent will help expand internal bandwidth to reduce the turnaround time for legal projects. The use of an onshore team and an offshore team will allow organizations to complete a project in a very short time frame. As mentioned before this will allow projects to be worked on for 24 hours a day since the time zone differences between countries. This will help get projects done in half the time it usually takes.

5) Flexibility

Employing a combination of onshore and offshore firms will allow the law firm and organization to tailor the capabilities in response to the workload and client demands.

For instance, you won’t have to pay an entire department in case of having a slow week. Your legal department will not be sitting around, doing nothing and getting paid, instead, you will just hire a temporary attorney abroad that will handle the legal processes for this period of time. This will save a lot of money and reduce expenses. Workflow challenges are prevalent for small and mid-sized firms. These firms will find it difficult to spread variability due to fewer attorneys.

By outsourcing to offshore lawyers, law firms can avoid the fixed costs of salaries and the benefits associated with the full-time workers.

6) Focus on the Business’s Mission and Bottom Line

In case you aren’t a law firm, you might want to focus more on the bottom line of your business and focus more on developing and improving the product or the service you provide. Well with outsourcing you will be able to do that.

You don’t have to spend time and money managing a legal department or paying a fortune to law firms locally to handle your legal work.

You can outsource all the legal work and forget about it. An offshore firm will take care of all the legal work for you while you focus on catching up with your competition and improving the service of the product you sell.

Other Areas for Legal Process Outsourcing

Luckily, you can outsource any type of work to a contract attorney or other service provider. Here are a few more tasks that you may want to consider outsourcing:

• Summary of the cases cited in an opposing party’s brief
• Legal research and memos
• Motions
• Pleadings
• Discovery, including subpoenas, RFPs, RROGS, and RFAs
• Discovery responses and pleadings like motions to compel/quash/protective order
• Document review
• Deposition summaries
• Leases
• Wills
• Trusts
• Powers of attorney
• Agreements
• Legal articles
• Demand letters and other correspondence
• Corporate documents like operating agreements, by-laws, and corporate resolutions