Below is a guest post written by one of my mentors, Lisa Solomon. Lisa is an accomplished freelance attorney and speaker whose practice has been featured in the National Law Journal (twice), the ABA Journal, JD Bliss and 50 Unique Legal Paths: How to Find the Right Job. In this post, Lisa responds to a post by an LPO, or Legal Process Outsourcing, director and addresses issues related to differences in the use of domestic freelance/contract attorneys and LPOs.
I’ve taken a fair amount of heat for pointing out that ABA Formal Op. 08-451, which states (with some important caveats) that foreign legal outsourcing is ethical, is actually good news for independent US-based contract lawyers because the same principles that allow firms to send legal work overseas also allow law students and graduates awaiting admission to do actual legal work when they’re working at firms, and allow lawyers to work as contract attorneys in jurisdictions in which they are not admitted. However, I’ve never taken a position on whether foreign legal process outsourcing is a good idea for hiring lawyers—solos and small firms who need the assistance of a qualified contract lawyer. Until now.
Yesterday, I saw a post in a LinkedIn group to which I belong, called Legal Research & Writing. Here’s the post, by Jagriti Mishra, the head of business development at an Indian LPO company called Draft N Craft:
Bursting the 7 Myths behind Legal Process Outsourcing.
This article attempts to address 7 common myths associated with the LPO industry
1> Whether outsourcing is synonym to compromise in quality?
2> Outsourcing is a compromise with confidentiality
3> It is unethical to outsource
4> By outsourcing, the vendor takes away outsourcer country’s jobs.
5> Indian LPO vendors compete with foreign law firms.
6> LPO vendors need malpractice insurance
7> Legal outsourcing starts instant savings and has no obligationsPlease refer the link below:-
Curious, I clicked through to the post, where I was immediately struck by Mishra’s discussion of the first “myth” behind legal process outsourcing:
Myth 1> LPO stands for PLPO (Para-Legal Process Outsourcing) and/or there is a compromise in quality.
The legal process outsourcing industry is at nascent state but is growing both monetarily and intellectually. Although it is true that High cost, more routine, lower risk legal works are easy to outsource, it in no way circumscribes the potentials of legal process outsourcing. The PLPO perception is a backlog, as the Legal outsourcing industry begun with routine work. Suffice it is to mention that various important player like (SDD and Lexadigm) have prepared Briefs and Motions to be filed in US courts. Our attorneys are trained for Multi jurisdictional research and assist:-
- US debt collection attorneys prepare Consumer Complaints, Briefs, and Motions for FDCPA, FCRA, FCBA and TILA violations.
- Social security attorneys in filing FIT, research on GRIDS, De novo appeal before ALJ.
- Bankruptcy attorney in intake form fill up and entering the information on Bankruptcy software.
- Foreclosure attorney in preparing complaints, motion and briefs to help the homeless.
- Contract review and management attorneys in contract Review including red lining and blue lining.
- Merger and Acquisition attorney for due diligence.
- For e-discovery solutions with cost advantage.
Quality is a term that takes new face with new situations. Clear guidelines, good teamwork and 100% quality check are the factors that coordinate in determining standards. It requires involvements from both the ends, keep a track of milestones and guidelines and the Outsourced service provider will ensure quality. We however, from our end add extra input to provide best quality deliverables. Had all vendors failed in providing quality this industry would have collapsed by now, the continuous growth reflects value.
Ironic, no?
Before other LPO companies get up in arms, I’ll concede that no doubt many of them have much better quality control than Draft N Craft (which I’d never heard of before reading Mr. Mishra’s post) appears to have. Nevertheless, the trainwreck of grammar and usage errors in Mr. Mishra’s post is a red flag. If the reading comprehension abilities of the foreign lawyers who work for a company like Draft N Craft is on par with the writing ability demonstrated in this post, any US lawyer who hires a company like this will have to do quite a bit of due diligence to ensure that the work product meets the standards set forth by the disciplinary authorities (to say nothing of the courts).
The other red flag in Mishra’s post is his claim that foreign LPO companies don’t have to carry malpractice insurance. Since at least 2003, experts have recommended that companies providing contract lawyering services carry malpractice (or errors and omissions) insurance. While it’s true that most malpractice policies should cover you for work performed on your behalf by a qualified contract lawyer, I’m unaware of any cases in which this has been challenged in the context of foreign legal outsourcing. I’d hate to be the test case.
Since I have never personally worked with a foreign LPO firm, I can’t comment on Mishra’s claims concerning security and confidentiality issues. And since I’m not an economist (heck, I didn’t even take Econ 101 in college), I won’t comment on Mishra’s analysis of the question of whether foreign outsourcing results in a net loss of jobs in the outsourcing country.
I agree with only two of Mishra’s arguments. An ethical foreign LPO company, like any ethical US-based contract lawyer, will not compete with you for your clients. The foreign LPO company (or a US-based contract lawyer who is not admitted in your jurisdiction) simply can’t represent your clients directly. And even a US-based contract lawyer who is providing services in a jurisdiction in which he or she is admitted to practice law won’t compete with you for your clients: simply put, we don’t want your clients—we want to work only for other lawyers.
I agree only to a point with Mishra’s analysis of the ethics decisions. Not a single bar association has determined that foreign legal outsourcing is per se unethical. However, Mishra gives short shrift to the caveats included in many of the opinions. You can find a more detailed discussion of the caveats in ABA Formal Op. 08-451 here.
The last thing that a busy solo or small firm lawyer wants to deal with when outsourcing substantive legal work is having to practically rewrite a brief to get it signature-ready. Sure, it costs more to outsource to a qualified, US-based independent contract lawyer than to send work overseas. But remember: you get what you pay for.
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The below reply was posted as comment in Lisa’s Blog.
Thanks Lisa for your comments and I appreciate your post above, as it gives me the opportunity to elicit the points which otherwise were beyond the scope of my article. I would try to do complete justice to the pertinent questions raised by you:-
Lisa:- “Before other LPO companies get up in arms, I’ll concede that no doubt many of them have much better quality control than Draft N Craft (which I’d never heard of before reading Mr. Mishra’s post) appears to have. Nevertheless, the trainwreck of grammar and usage errors in Mr. Mishra’s post is a red flag. If the reading comprehension abilities of the foreign lawyers who work for a company like Draft N Craft is on par with the writing ability demonstrated in this post, any US lawyer who hires a company like this will have to do quite a bit of due diligence to ensure that the work product meets the standards set forth by the disciplinary authorities (to say nothing of the courts).”
Reply:- You will appreciate that neither the article nor the Blog post are indicative of deliverables or ready to file documents. A better way to comment on qualitative and beneficial aspects would be to have a deliverable of a LPO company in hand and then to point out the flaws and area of improvements in it. My role in Business Development is more into developing strategy in a competitive market, and the Blog in question is an effort towards compiling some common concerns of the Legal Outsourcing Industry and is in no way indicative of work product meeting US/UK standards.
Lisa:- “The last thing that a busy solo or small firm lawyer wants to deal with when outsourcing substantive legal work is having to practically rewrite a brief to get it signature-ready. Sure, it costs more to outsource to a qualified, US-based independent contract lawyer than to send work overseas. But remember: you get what you pay for.”
Reply:- I believe that outsourcing is altogether more beneficial for busy solo or small firms. While developing strategy for my company I realized that solo practitioners and small firms (one below 15 attorneys) amounts for more than 85% of total legal work, but at the same time are hardly outsourced. This is an area which Draft N Craft is targeting. The idea is to get all the back office work from these small firms outsourced, allowing our clients with more time, resources and cost advantages. These solo and small firms practicing in the area of Debt Collection, SSD, Bankruptcy and foreclosure are a great resource for us. I reiterate at the cost of brevity that a deliverable document in hand would be better indicative of work product.
Thanks for your valued interest in the article.
Rather than re-posting the entire exchange between me and Mr. Mishra that has gone on over at my blog (I responded to his comment, he replied, and I responded to his reply), I invite your readers to visit my site at http://legalresearchandwritingpro.com/blog/2009/1...
A client who is the victim of a outsourcing lawyer should consent to his work being outsourced and who be told of the economes of the same and should be fairly given the benifit of the economic advantages the oursourcing lawyer is gaining in the process, at the same time putting the confedentiality and comprehension of the legal assignment to grave risk.
As a lawyer who outsources as much as ethically and responsibly possible, I can attest to the fact that there's good and bad in everything. I've outsourced work to U.S. providers and have been appalled at the quality level in some cases, amazed and thankful in others. The same thing goes for overseas providers.
The important thing to remember is that it's the lawyer's job to vet potential providers regardless of their location. Some Indian LPO companies, for example, are staffed to the gills with US-trained lawyers who have opted to return home; these are incredibly intelligent and well-reasoned professionals who went to law schools that would have laughed at me had I applied for admission.
There's no one-size-fits-all in this space. The lawyer's role remains one of a diligent supervisor, ensuring quality of representation regardless of the location of the outsourced provider.
Thanks for your reply, Jay. Always very insightful.
Here is a comment from Laurie Donahue posted on LinkedIn:
"Before other LPO companies get up in arms, I’ll concede that no doubt many of them have much better quality control than Draft N Craft (which I’d never heard of before reading Mr. Mishra’s post) appears to have. Nevertheless, the trainwreck of grammar and usage errors in Mr. Mishra’s post is a red flag. If the reading comprehension abilities of the foreign lawyers who work for a company like Draft N Craft is on par with the writing ability demonstrated in this post, any US lawyer who hires a company like this will have to do quite a bit of due diligence to ensure that the work product meets the standards set forth by the disciplinary authorities (to say nothing of the courts)."
I disagree. The due diligence needs to happen BEFORE the LPO is selected — not after the work product is produced — and the same applies to providers of US-based contract lawyers.
Whether staffing is on-shore or off, clients need to ask how the attorneys are selected (are there standardized tests of writing skills and legal knowledge? what are the cutoff scores for projects of varying complexity?) How are people trained? How are people supervised? What QA processes are in place? Do the people doing the training and supervision and QA "know what 'good' looks like" — or do they have to wait for the client to tell them?
For example, my own company worked on a very large project involving hundreds of our own lawyers off-shore, plus hundreds on-shore provided by another vendor, all doing the same work.
The on-shore lawyers apparently received only minimal training, since they were all US law school grads. In contrast, we gave our team members in India and the Philippines 64 hours of online training in US law, followed by a proctored exam and a month of on-site one-on-one "elbow training" by our US lawyers based in Israel.
Our offshore team produced work with half as many errors as the US-based lawyers produced — and at half the cost.
(The client also adopted our online tests to evaluate candidates provided by the rival vendor.)
The point is, the quality of legal staffing companies varies both on-shore and off. Potential clients need to do their due diligence before retaining one — not after the first memo is delivered.