Legal Process Outsourcing
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Legal Process Outsourcing (LPO) is the industry in which in-house legal departments or organisations outsource legal work from areas where it is costly to perform, such as the United States or Europe to areas where it can be performed at a significantly decreased cost, primarily India.
Legal Process Outsourcing covers the following services in general:
- Legal Research
- Document Drafting like standard contracts, agreements, letters to the clients, patent applications etc.
- Legal Billing activities like preparation of invoices, collation of time sheets etc.
- Intellectual Property research--substantive and administrative
- Paralegal Services
- Administrative and secretarial activities like following up with clients, etc.
The work is done by experienced paralegals and attorneys using industry standard databases like Lexisnexis and Westlaw. The main criteria for deriving value from such services is the level of maturity of delivery processes of the service provider. Also sufficient control should be exercised on the operations to ensure that the work is delivered to the level of expectation of quality of the client and the data is secure.
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[edit] Advantages
Most firms and corporations outsource primarily for cost saving measures and this is considered the biggest advantage for legal process outsourcing. While an attorney in major legal markets such as the US may charge over 250 dollars for work, countries that are offering legal process outsourcing charge just a fraction.
[edit] Criticism
One of the major concerns with legal process outsourcing is the potential for breach of clients confidentiality. Another concern is that the people performing legal work in different countries are not bound by by the same ethical standards attorneys are subject to at home.[1]
