Legal Process Outsourcing Needs To Be Developed In India

Maharashtra, India: The legal process outsourcing had garnered a lot of media attention in India, but still there is sizeable proportion of legal community that still needs to consider the legal services to low cost destinations.

The offshoring of legal process outsourcing services to India goes to way back in 1995 when law firm Bickel & Brewer initiated its captive process in India. The legal process outsourcing began to gain popularity around 2005. Within few years in business, the industry has made a profit of $225 million in revenues in the year 2008. However, this is only very small portion for the entire legal processing outsourcing industry. According to a recent survey results, the legal experts are not aware of the benefit of legal process outsourcing services. If it is addressed properly, the legal outsourcing in India is expected to grow by leap and bounds.

Most of the law firms are relatively new in terms of outsourcing and have not incorporated offshoring in their overall business strategy. A large number of law firms, irrespective of the size of their business are apprehensive about offshoring their legal work to BPO service providers in India. They have also expressed concerns regarding data security,client confidentiality and the quality of work being delivered.

The reduction in cost is one of the primary factor for offshoring legal services to India. The other significant drivers include client pressure to reduce costs by offshoring, increasing work pressure, time zone and competitors decision to offshore work. According to Neeraj Kandala the lead analyst of legal services, there is some awareness regarding the benefits of offshoring work. However majority of the benefits are not that substantial to overcome their concerns.

Data security and quality of work are some of the major concerns for the law firms. Most of the legal documents have confidential data and it is quite understandable that the law firms might have apprehensions with respect to security.

There are reputed and experienced offshore legal service providers that do take adequate precautions to ensure that there is no security breach. Therefore, the legal firms needs to be convinced regarding this. Further, the global BPO service providers need to win the confidence of the legal firms by providing quality work. This should be taken as a challenge for the provider community as the gap between the quality providers and not-so- good providers will remain a consistent problem until sufficient maturity is earned both by the legal firms and the service providers.