Low Cost
Offshoring legal services would reduce costs for American customers as the rates for legal workers in low-cost destinations are about 20 percent to 27 percent of their average American and U.K. counterparts. Several top LPOs have already been formed and have established reference client bases. They offer huge savings and the ability for many law firms and corporate law divisions to transform their activities by focusing on core functions, as well as expanding into new area.

Companies like GE, Oracle, Sun Microsystems and Cisco have been able to save several million dollars by offshoring legal tasks related to patent research and documentation to LPOs in India, and the Philippines, or Eastern Europe.

In New York, most legal fees go to real estate. By coming to Mysore, SDD has eliminated that. It pays $2,000 rent per month for its three-storey office building. For that kind of money it wouldn't have got anything in New York. Also, Mysore is over five times cheaper than New York, if you consider legal services fees. Naturally, buyers of legal services aren’t complaining. The company bills its clients $30 to $90 per hour compared to $200 to $700 per hour in the U.S.

“There are a lot of educated people in Mysore. Traffic congestion is non-existent. Commute time is one minute to 10 minutes. Office space is 43 times cheaper than in Manhattan,” says Russell Smith, President and Chairman, SDD Global Solutions. The company has 40 people at present, and by the middle of next year it plans to expand the team to 160.

Ensuring Quality
SQ Global Solutions, a venture between Strategic Legal Solutions, a domestic legal-staffing firm, and Quislex, a leading provider of offshore legal services in India, has created an onshore/offshore legal-services outsourcing model whereby American project managers (lawyers) ensure quality control by overseeing and training a team of India-based attorneys. This hybrid onshore/offshore model allows law firms and in-house counsel clients to quickly shift work between domestic and overseas lawyers, and offers onshore accountability.

“We do tasks like contract review, litigation services such as document review and subjective coding, M&As diligence and legal research. We have several Fortune 500 and Am Law 100 clients. We do regular repeat work for about 30 clients,” says Ram Vasudevan, President, SQ Global Solutions.

SQ Global Solutions does high-end work in the LPO spectrum that includes document review, contract analysis, due diligence and legal research. It has scaled up in complexity over the past three years, and expects the trend to continue as LPOs add more accretive value to their clients.

LPO firms typically do not have many people unlike their BPO or knowledge process outsourcing counterparts, claiming that they are not into the volumes business, but in delivering high-end services. Let’s take, Delhi-based LPO Verist for instance. It started about two years ago and today has only 15 people doing work like legal research, patent drafting, litigation support, and analytics. Another law firm, Legasis Partners has a team of 20 people working for global clients.

But what about dealing with issues like knowing the laws of different countries and ethical guidelines? While training helps, Vasudevan elaborates, “Legal work that is outsourced must be performed conforming to the ethical guidelines provided by various Bar Associations in the U.S. We have procedures to ensure we comply with these guidelines and that our client interests are never compromised.” As LPO service providers scale up their offerings, they could soon look like mirror images of the firms that offshore tasks to them.