Legal Process Outsourcing
Six misconceptions about legal process outsourcing
Running a law firm, or even a corporate legal department, is a herculean task that requires extraordinary labour and time commitment. As a result, irrespective of your team size, expertise, time commitment, and productivity, there is a cap to how much work you can take on. This sometimes can mean taking on an additional workload to meet deadlines or turning away clients, neither of which is advisable for a healthy work-life balance or the growth of your business. Legal services outsourcing is a great way to avoid such circumstances and cross off some tedious and repetitive tasks from your workload to focus more on core aspects of the legal processes.
However, many business owners and law firms believe they do not need legal process outsourcing solutions because they either fail to understand the benefits of outsourcing legal services or have some misconceptions about outsourcing legal work. These misconceptions, however, are nothing but stereotypes or myths that are often untrue and can cause losses in missed opportunities.
Six common misconceptions and myths about legal service outsourcing
To combat the stereotypes and maximise all resources at our disposal, we must first understand the most common legal process outsourcing misconceptions among modern legal professionals. Some of the common misconceptions about outsourcing legal services, like legal research, contract drafting, court appearances or document review, include:
- You only need to outsource when in dire need
- Outsourcing is costly
- Small businesses do not need a legal department
- Outsourcing can affect work quality
- Outsourcing is time-consuming
- Outsourcing can violate client confidentiality
Many legal professionals are used to dealing with emergent dire situations because of tight deadlines or excessive workloads. As a result, feel that outsourcing is only an option in urgent situations and cannot help day-to-day activities.
There are many misconceptions and myths regarding the cost of outsourcing. Many legal professionals feel that outsourcing legal services is expensive and outsourcing service providers are out to get your money. Although there may indeed be some hidden costs in outsourcing, you can always ask your service provider for a detailed price list, so you are prepared.
Many small business owners also feel that only big corporations need legal services. However, even for a small business, you need a lawyer for things like business registration, drafting and review of legal documents, protecting your business's intellectual property or dealing with any legal issue that may arise. Legal services outsourcing can allow you to deal with all these without building an in-house legal team.
Many legal professionals believe that no one else can do the job as well as they can, thus, finding it difficult to hand off or delegate tasks to even the best agencies. The conception that the freelancer's or legal outsourcing service provider's work will not be up to standard or unusable prevents many legal professionals from delegating and outsourcing tasks. But they fail to realise that a reputed legal outsourcing service provider can give you high-quality work while saving you time.
Many legal professionals also believe outsourcing is time-consuming, from finding the right outsourcing service provider to delegating tasks. However, they fail to realise that this time is negligible compared to the time they would save by outsourcing certain tasks, which they can then dedicate to other critical functions.
Client confidentiality is integral to the legal profession, and many lawyers are concerned that outsourcing can jeopardise it. Data security and privacy measures may vary between service providers. But you can confirm the legal outsourcing service provider's diligence about securing client information.
Although these misconceptions are still prevalent among legal professionals, many have started to realise the value of outsourcing certain legal processes and have started embracing legal services outsourcing.
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How can Infosys BPM help?
Partnering with General Counsels, CIOs, CPOs and law firms, Infosys BPM Legal Process Management services has strived to streamline, transform, and automate legal processes to ensure your team can leverage their skills and experience and expertise more effectively. With service and technology solutions like eDiscovery Managed Services, Contract Management, Research Solutions, Contract Analysis, and Next Generation eDiscovery you can easily reduce workload and leverage legal service outsourcing to improve your efficiency.
