Legal Services

Legal Services Offshoring or LSO is one of the main part of KPO operational areas. This particular service is required in such industries, like KPOs, in which in-house legal departments or organisations offshore legal work from areas where it is costly to perform, such as the United States or Europe to areas where it can be performed at a significantly decreased cost, primarily India. Legal Services Offshoring is a high end industry that has been growing rapidly in the recent years.

Such industries are also known as Legal Process Outsourcing or LPO. But, to the extent that the word, 'process', suggests standardized, commoditized, easy-to-replicate tasks that can be performed without a lot of education, much less professional training, it is a misnomer for the legal services offshoring industry. Typing a medical transcription, or answering calls based on a script, is obviously a process. On the other hand, legal services such as legal research, legal analysis, or drafting complaints, contracts, patent applications, or legal briefs, is not a BPO-like, commoditized process. That is why many in this industry do not refer to themselves as LPOs. Yet another potential misnomer is “outsourcing.” There is nothing new or controversial about the outsourcing of legal services. Every law firm in the U.S. and the U.K. is an outsourcing company. Their corporate clients have routinely “outsourced” legal services work to outside counsel for hundreds of years. If there were no outsourcing, there would be no law firms. What is new is not outsourcing, but offshoring.