Legal process outsourcing (LPO) means hiring a specialised third-party provider to handle legal support work, such as contract management, eDiscovery, legal research, or compliance monitoring, that would otherwise be done in-house by a corporate legal department or law firm.
Corporate legal departments and law firms today face mounting demands: rising legal spend, shrinking budgets, and pressure to do more with the same headcount. Problems in resource management and process optimisation continue to strain legal teams across industries.
Restructuring of organisations and evolving regulations have further led to more legal spend. Other challenges include cybersecurity concerns, hurdles in remote work, optimising process workflows, and adopting new technologies.
According to Goldman Sachs, up to 44% of current legal work tasks could be automated using generative AI, a scale of disruption that is pushing legal departments to rethink which work should stay in-house.
In view of these ground realities, you need to improve efficiency in workflows and add relevant skill sets. The solution to growing in-house capabilities and flexibility as well as minimising costs is often found in a winning partnership with a legal process outsourcing (LPO) specialist.
Future trends in legal services: Why LPO process matters?
Many trends in legal services today underscore the benefits legal processing outsourcing offers.
Growth in the adoption of virtual tools and services is no surprise, given that a majority of the work is now done remotely. Clients are relying more on technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and eDiscovery for their legal needs.
Take eDiscovery itself. From emails to video recordings as well as compiling, securing, and delivering electronically processed information is becoming prominent in lawsuits and investigations. Quality control of data is also a must for cloud platforms in legal services.
Besides these, virtual assistants help tackle complex legal services, using automation to improve efficiencies and reduce costs. Hybrid outsourcing projects allow legal processes to work round the clock between distribution centres.
How agentic AI is changing legal process outsourcing
The next shift in legal process outsourcing is agentic AI: AI systems that don’t just assist with a single task but can plan and carry out multi-step legal workflows with minimal human input, such as triaging incoming contracts, routing them to the right reviewer, and flagging non-standard clauses before a human ever opens the document. Infosys BPM’s own Topaz AI ecosystem already applies this kind of automation across contract management, eDiscovery, and legal research, and it is a theme the broader legal industry is actively grappling with.
Which legal services to outsource?
Before outsourcing any work to a third party, you must identify the most critical areas that would benefit from standardisation across your legal department. So, what kind of legal services are most amenable to outsourcing?
Often, the following legal processes are outsourced to experienced service providers:
IT and administration:
Data collection and extraction, data entry, information management, billing, and legal eDiscovery processes.
Contracts:
Legal contract lifecycle management, from creation and negotiation through execution and approval.
Research:
Legal research services and drafting, pre-compliance monitoring, compliance implementation, and multi-jurisdiction risk assessment surveys.
Court appearances and litigation support:
Appearance counsel for routine hearings, case and written work support, and litigation document review.
Other significant outsourced legal work includes intellectual property (IP) and document review.
Advantages of Outsourcing Legal Process
Trim costs effectively
When you make processes more efficient, they help reduce operational and overhead costs in return. Eliminating the need for in-house resources, legal process outsourcing helps streamline workflows and reduces the cost of reviews.
Access legal expertise
Expert legal process outsourcing partners have the experience and technical know-how that go beyond standardised offerings. They also offer consultancy services and recommendations for a wide range of challenges that your business might encounter.
Get 24 x 7 support
Outsourcing to an offshore partner gives you not only flexibility but also constant support around the clock. This 24 x 7 service lets you access skilled experts exactly when you need them the most so that you can easily scale up or condense your operations.
Reduce turnaround time
The automation of repetitive tasks in legal, and future-ready technological solutions that provide more process visibility, results in a time-efficient legal process.
The global legal process outsourcing market was valued at USD 13.67 billion in 2022 and is projected to reach USD 117.89 billion by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 31.4%, according to Grand View Research, a sign of how quickly legal teams are turning to outsourcing to manage rising costs and workloads.
How to select a legal outsourcing provider?
Your Legal Processing Outsourcing service partner should ideally offer custom solutions that take a holistic approach to resolving legal challenges. So, how should a company select legal process outsourcing providers? Before zeroing in on one, ask these questions:
- How much experience does the vendor have in your niche?
- What are their technological capabilities in legal processing outsourcing?
- Does the service provider have in-house subject matter experts?
- Can the outsourced process deliver sustained, tangible efficiencies?
- How do they implement data safety and confidentiality?
Infosys BPM answers your questions
With an optimal cost model for LPO services and deep domain expertise, we can help transform, standardise, and automate legal tasks for your business.
Experience the benefits of integrated IT support for eDiscovery lifecycle, contract lifecycle management, and research. Our LPO services come with AI-enabled solutions that increase quality and productivity through a combination of proprietary and market-leading tools.
We are capable of working as an extended arm of the client’s external attorney or law firm. To meet varying comfort levels and risk appetites, we also offer on-shore, near-shore, and offshore capabilities.
Frequently asked questions
Legal process outsourcing (LPO) is the practice of hiring a specialised third-party provider to handle legal support work such as contract management, eDiscovery, or legal research. It makes the most sense when in-house teams are stretched by rising case or contract volumes, need specific technology capabilities they don’t have internally, or want to redirect senior legal staff toward higher-value strategic work instead of repetitive process tasks.
LPO streamlines legal work by moving high-volume, repeatable tasks, such as document review, compliance monitoring, and contract intake, onto standardised, technology-enabled workflows run by a dedicated outsourcing partner. This frees in-house legal staff from routine processing work so they can focus on negotiation, strategy, and matters that need direct legal judgement.
Agentic AI is moving legal process outsourcing beyond single-task automation toward AI systems that can carry out multi-step workflows on their own, such as triaging incoming contracts, routing them to the right reviewer, and flagging unusual clauses before a human review even begins. This builds on top of existing AI-enabled LPO tools already used for contract analysis and eDiscovery, rather than replacing them.
