OUTSOURCING: A way to the future

The present economy era, characterized by widespread technological growth and advancement in communication systems, has considerably shrunk the distance between the two ends of the globe. In a scenario where the geographical barriers have been surmounted by technical progress, the concept of outsourcing has witnessed a boom and has become a trend in the business industry. With a view to adapt to the market pressures in a highly competitive economical set-up, the business entities are increasingly focusing at availing the modernized and developed business strategies among which outsourcing has proved to be one of the most efficient support systems.

With the legal industry gaining momentum and striving to stay ahead in the highly competitive and global marketplace, legal process outsourcing has been recognized as a compelling business strategy to achieve the business objectives. The increasing drift towards outsourcing of legal work has been triggered by the endeavour of the legal entities to concentrate on their key areas and delegate the back office work to skilled and expert workforce thus preventing the diversion of their human resources to non-core areas.

Apart from facilitating high quality and organized product by skilled workforce, outsourcing has many other advantages which help companies in increasing their time efficiency and boosting economic growth. The fact that it has helped the companies gain a competitive edge in a highly competitive global scenario has made it a lucrative and viable business strategy. Outsourcing non key tasks like legal research, document review and writing on a project-to-project basis proves cost-effective as it reduces labour costs and enables the in-house counsel of the law firms to focus on their major legal issues. Further, the availability of skilled labour force at internationally competitive rates compels the legal establishments to get their work done cost effectively through globally talented workforce.

Outsourcing, though mainly initiated with the allocation of low-end work like transcription, but within a short span of time grew rapidly and witnessed delegation of all kinds of legal support services like legal research, electronic document management, document review, legal writing, data processing, patent search, patent drafting, contract drafting and management, SEC documents etc. to outside agencies.

India is continuously growing as a widely preferred outsourcing location. In the legal industry, where success is principally driven by the cost and efficiency factors, India, as an outsourcing destination provides various advantages to the foreign companies striving to achieve their strategic business objectives.

The resemblance of the Indian legal systems with the legal systems of US, UK, Canada, and a sizeable part of Europe is the main factor that enables the Indian legal professionals to understand the technicalities of a legal proposition in an equally efficient manner as their foreign counterparts. The talented pool of English speaking lawyers in India, familiar with the canons of common law also ensures that the outsourced project is handled with utmost dexterity. Moreover, the significantly lower labour cost in India facilitates the availability of cost-efficient product without any compromise on the quality.

Technological progress has contributed to the growth of legal outsourcing by enabling the legal entities to minimize security risks and safely transfer data through secured networks facilitating safe delegation of tasks to third parties in the other side of the globe. The considerations like the security and confidentiality which earlier led to a misconception of loss of effective control over the processed and finished data have also been taken care of. With the advanced and technical data security measures employed by the outsourcing companies like the non-disclosure agreements, data encryption at various levels and other in-house security features, the issues relating to the protection of confidential information in the outsourcing process have been suitably addressed.

In a dynamic and ever-evolving legal field, outsourcing combines all the benefits for the companies striving for a progressive leap in the legal sphere by increasing profitability. A phenomenon that has led to marked development in the legal area, outsourcing is the future of a progressive and competitive legal industry.