What is the story with Legal Process Transformation?

There are a number of organisations that have already offshored or outsourced a number of their business functions, which leads to a discussion about what comes next. Through 2011, the legal function is being reviewed to assess what level of efficiencies and service improvements can be achieved. This is leading to a significant increase in outsourcing in legal and the reports suggesting the market is expected to cross the $1 billion by the end of this year.

Whilst Legal Process Transformation began with legal firms offshoring activities to lower the cost to serve their customer base, the current trend is the legal process transformation within corporate organisations. In the last twelve months we have noted significant developments with: Thomson Reuters acquiring the boutique LPO provider Pangea3 to gain a footprint in the market; Microsoft announcing a LPO joint venture with Wipro, and the use of Integreon for internal legal processes; TCS recently announcing a focus on LPO to increase their client base (from 3 LPO clients) and many corporate organisations either migrating activity offshore or outsourcing to a Third Party.

Legal functions are known to be under high workload pressures leading to a focus on reactive delivery of services to the detriment of a more strategic direction. This coupled with unclear and sometimes conflicting expectations from the internal customer base, and an acute balancing act to be performed on utilising internal and external resources, makes the transformation both complex and political but represents a significant opportunity for financial and non financial value creation.