In a move from their traditionally guarded position, law firms are becoming more open about the necessity for legal process outsourcing, hinting at a strong outlook for the sector. The news emerged from New York's LPO Summit, held by the American Conference Institute (ACI) at the Marriott East Side Hotel on 15 and 16 September. Global economic turbulence was cited as the motivation behind the sea change, as law firms attempt to drive down costs and pass savings on to clients.

Kevin Reilley, Senior Vice President of Legal Services with leading legal outsourcing provider – and event sponsor – CPA, told IP Review Online: 'There were several comments from law firm speakers, along with in-house attorneys, who all indicated that it was not a question of if, but when, they embraced this, and how they embraced this. There was no question mark over whether LPO was going to be a big part of their practices. So there's still a lot of learning going on about, "How do we really manage our offshore partner?" and, for corporations, "How do we manage to get consistent results across many outside law firms? What should be the role of in-house counsel, and what should be the role of an LPO provider partner?" Law firms have indicated that times are very tough. Their costs are high, they're under immense pressure from their clients to come up with value-based billing and, therefore, they have recognised that they need to have a strategy around LPO.'

Why partnership matters
In a key presentation, Kevin offered a range of telling insights into best practice for LPO contracts, drawn from CPA's experience of providing solutions from its Delhi knowledge base. Taking his lead from Vantage Partners' Danny Ertel, who preceded him at the podium, Kevin explained the benefits of collaboration as essential to outsourcing governance. 'Our goal is a dedicated delivery team model,' he said. 'The partnership model is one that allows us to achieve immediate infrastructure and labour cost savings that also bring process improvement to every engagement we do. We often improve workflow efficiency and we've had outstanding quality on the projects we've done. Over time, we will be helping our law firm clients to transform their businesses – they will be able to restructure out some of their fixed costs, and offer staff an attorney career path.'

Domain expertise
According to Kevin, transformational partnerships work equally well for in-house legal teams of large corporations, who will be free to focus on innovating through the use of technology. 'For example,' he said, 'a corporation could be using 50 people to perform a compliance function. We may be able to perform that same function with 30 people in India, but using technology that's more efficient and effective for managing the workflow. So we can actually build efficiencies into the model – and the way that that's done best is through a partnership, rather than on a temporary-labour basis.'

Kevin stressed that clients will find a well-schooled and adaptable provider indispensable. 'Past performance is an indicator of future results,' he said, 'and that comes down to the governance of your people – their hiring; their training; defining best-practices, and those other methodologies that we've developed for engaging clients: assessing our service-delivery model and measuring it in reporting. We have a big training effort underway in India right now where our clients' subject matter is taught in very detailed curricula, both in classroom lectures and e-learning – and we are training our attorneys in very specific areas of US and UK law, plus contract management law and legal research. So it's been a very significant investment and effort – but it's certainly something that our clients have said really matters.'

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