Legal process outsourcing is a kind of virtual assistance for offshore attorneys, law firms and lawyers. It is coming upfront due to pervasive common law practices across many continents. Basically, this outsourcing outperforms in these domains:
• Managerial projects
• Legal research & analysis
• Library services
• Support services
It’s stretching to distant lands just because of the trend of practicing laws in English language, which is universally accepted. The law firms and lawyers navigate through time and cost-centric challenges with the advantages of this outsourcing. The turnaround time defeats the clock, which they utilize in the research of legal matters. The quality and data security assure them to sought-after this assistance.
Besides, the technology governs, where advanced communication systems emerge in a prominent role. The geographical boundaries do not matter due to constantly evolving new techniques. The relentlessly evolving competitive and economic scenario demands for taking advantages of the legal virtual assistance.
So, you can gear up to start a legal process outsourcing business in India. Here are a few clues to know your target audience and what kind of work it can ask for:
Target Audience or Clientele:
1. Law firms
2. In-house legal departments
3. Attorneys
4. Real-Estates
5. Law libraries
Standard requirements that you should know how to meet:
• Data collected directly from the client’s office and over the internet
• Data warehousing of hard and soft copies to carry out data extraction, transformation and loading (ETL)
• Tools, techniques and software for frictionless communication, such as Zoom, Skype and G Suite
• Document scanning and OCR facilities
• Process set up and provision of training
• Have experienced attorneys and legal experts in the respective fields
• Robust security structure for client’s data
• Catalogue specifying pricing to enable offshore clients look into costing corresponding to legal process outsourcing
• Reporting architect
• Defined delivery framework, which can be emailing, cloud computing or fax the transcribed reports
• Quality assurance certifications, such as ISO 9000:2015 and NASSCOM
Prospective work assignments:
1. Legal transcription: Being a matter of confidentiality, the client expects a high level of confidentiality, years of experience with accuracy, round o’clock accessibility and a short Turn Around Time (TAT). So, you should keep these points into account while accepting these assignments:
• Transcription of meetings (minutes) or conference
• Interviews
• Phone conversations
• Accident reports
• Deposition summaries
• Summaries
Verbatim (the conversation in exactly the same words as were used originally) is demanded for:
• Transcribing what the focus group says
• Keeping legal records due to statutory reasons
• Editing videos and audios
Likewise, offshore clients come with the intention of collecting summarizing and preparing report for:
• Serving readers a better and more efficient document, stating only necessary information.
• Saving time to edit a transcription
• Enhancing the impact of client meetings/ events
2. Legal documents: The documents pertaining to litigations can be your client’s requirement. But, they cannot have a universal structure to adapt a variety of cases or projects. For example- a judicial trial can be required for reporting in a newspaper. The same can be the need to annex with a report as a testimonial document. Likewise, there are many law firms that require a particular legal document. But, discovering knowledge from the unstructured data is a big challenge. Therefore, they hire for the legal process outsourcing to extract, validate, streamline and understand case-specific information in less time.
These are the documents that you can approach for:
• Knowledge discovery for assistance
• Collecting reviews for cataloguing documents to derive pertaining data
• Corporate due diligence
• Managing databases to prepare pertaining information
• OCR of the legal documents for digitizing typically paper-bound cases
• Document imaging
• Data acquisition, retrieval and conversion
• Relevance and privilege analysis
• De-duplication & verification
• Summarization of amassed data
3. Legal research: It’s a dimension of legal practitioners and law-pundits. Such legal entities particularly look for these documents for the research projects:
• Multi-jurisdictional surveys of state and local cases, laws, statutes, ordinance and regulations
• Identification and summarization of relevant law case
• Statutory and case law analysis related to litigation
• Cross-checking citations for briefing
4. Appellate research: It specifically relates to appeals made in the courts, such as the United States Court of Appeals for veteran’s claims, DC circuit court of appeals and California court of appeals.
5. Corporate Secretarial: Corporate governance codes and regulations are the must-to-know for various companies, ranging from small scale to big enterprises. The corporate governance architecture covers all these, which may require a virtual assistant for legal processes to save on time:
• Handling administrative work
• Legal requirements for a company
• Handling statutory compliance and corporate governance code along with secretarial services
• Comprehending and drafting board and shareholder resolution and minutes
• Incorporating documents
• Maintaining resolutions and minutes’ libraries
• Federal tax data collection and fraud analysis
6. Agreements drafting and management: The number of commercial entities is snowballing. Their rapidly increasing numbers raise the scope for legal process outsourcing to integrate administrative services with contracting, licencing and their management seamlessly. The related projects can be your cup of tea while delivering legal outsourcing services, such as:
• Drafting contracts based on pre-agreed precedents & guidelines
• Drawing guidelines for infringement
• Time of essence in agreements
• Enforcing incompetent covenants
• Disseminating the copy of contracts and solicit comments
• Review the copy of drafting contracts on pre-agreed guidelines
• Accept or reject or amend commends based on pre-agreed guidelines and redistribute
• Prepare final copy of the drafts
• Upload and maintain client’s databases along with summarized key
7. Real Estate research and documentation: There are some global realtors who seek assistance for appraisal data entry and other property management documents or statistics for research. They may seek your legal assistance in documenting these:
• Appraisal data entry
• Home owner association capacity
• Adverse possession by home owners
The market of LPO is globally expanding by leaps and bounds. By catering standard legal services, one can easily stand in the queue wherein Cogneesol, Infosys and Legal Support World lead.
