Thinking about outsourcing? Take a deep breadth and you may want sit down till the thought passes. Many outsourcing arrangements fail for a variety of reasons and even when they succeed the costs incurred may be more than the costs saved.

One of the biggest risks is protecting your intellectual property (“IP”) when it is outsourced. There are no silver bullets that will guarantee protection. But if you choose to outsource, there are some guidelines you might wish to follow to reduce the risk that your IP will be compromised when outsourcing to an overseas vendor (“Vendor”). Here they are. Read More..

The natural progression of a nation’s economy usually flows from agriculture to industrialization to services. The first two (agriculture and industrialization) can be affected by imports or foreign competition but realistically speaking cannot be outsourced. It is only when the economy enters into the third and definitive stage of services that the law of survival kicks in and paves way for outsourcing.

In a commercial contest of homogeneous service providers, the winner is usually the vendor with the best price. This simple economic principle gets elevated almost to law of nature in a credit starved economy. Jingoistic economic fervor apart all of us realize this simple home truth that if a law firm is able to retain a client by billing him at $X an hour because some of its back office processes have been outsourced then there is no way it can continue to service the same client at $X+10 an hour merely because it has been forced to severe its outsourcing ties given to political interests. The market would simply cease to exist at that price.

Many good points already have been made about what offshore legal outsourcing (or legal process outsourcing/LPO) has achieved in 2010, and what it is likely to contribute in 2011. But this is not just a new year; it's a new decade. This second decade of the 21st century is the one in which the legal world, as we know it, might be turned upside down. Along with related factors, offshore legal outsourcing is likely to continue to be among the leaders of the law revolution.

In the new, client-centric legal world, legal services providers can no longer rely on privileged positions. They can no longer depend on unwavering acceptance of the old model, which Cisco General Counsel Mark Chandler famously described as "the last vestige of the medieval guild system to survive into the 21st century." Lawyers and law firms must deliver value. That's what high-quality, offshore legal outsourcing is all about. This is the number one reason why the LPO (legal process outsourcing) sector is likely to continue to boom throughout the new decade.

More and more firms coming out to catch with the demands in legal offshoring work, the sense is in right investments, a perfect strategy to follow for a better return to your investments. LPO is for sure a golden opportunity that the legal industry throws on far flung destinations, but many newly started LPOs had to down the shutters for not able to tap this prospect.

Like any demanding industry, legal process offshoring firms require a strategy to maintain infrastructure. Market services, have a good legal team, a highly decorated office or a flaringly designed office would not help secure the market. The organizational make-up should not only impress the clients, also satisfy their challenging concerns about the firm.

When the news broke recently that Microsoft is going to outsource more of its legal processing work to the BPO division of Wipro Technologies in Bangalore, people couldn’t help but wonder: Why not send some of that LPO work to companies closer to home?

There’s no lack of BPO companies in neighboring countries like Costa Rica and Mexico, to name just two. (And as one observer told us, LPO is basically another form of BPO.) Well, the biggest reason is simple: It’s hard to find a nearshore firm that’s doing LPO.

Friends, there is no doubt about the fact that the Indian legal system has to go a long way and implement newer laws before India can truly become the best destination of choice for off-shoring legal work by foreign law firms and corporations. There needs to be a major change and shift in the attitude of the Indian legislators in the matter. Some proactive action needs to be taken by all in the industry to force, cajole, convince, lure the Indian legislature to enact laws which shall unambiguously establish India to be an extremely LPO friendly country. It is important that by such laws the foreign buyers be made to feel “at home” in India.

Many of you who keep yourselves abreast of the developments in the LPO scenario around the globe must have heard about the “largest deal in the legal market”. But the much spoken about LPO deal between CMS Cameron McKenna and Integreon for a 10-year, period and valued at £583 million seems to be not exclusively for pure legal services. It seems to be for a well coined level of “middle-office services”

Some Indians suffer from a mental “disconnect” whenever it comes to issues about foreign countries. Everything that is “foreign” seems to be like rocket-science to them. This mindset is particularly present in people who have not been groomed up in the comparatively bigger cities in India. I would not take it as a fault on their part; it is just that they never got exposure to bigger things of life and it does not necessarily mean that they cannot adapt themselves to the bigger picture.

Even bright young law graduates who have done well in their law examinations in India, tend to feel that they are just not being able to grasp anything while attending training session/s about the basics of FRCP or CPR. It is not that they do not have the capacity to understand, but the very feeling of dealing with civil procedural codes of US or UK brings in an element of disconnect in their minds. This sense of “disconnect” prevents them from grasping even the very basics of legal theories which are more or less the same as between CPC and CPR or CPC and FRCP.

Though SLA defines the level of the service and it includes the element of quality but it is very necessary that the smallest nitty gritty of measuring quality be extremely well defined. As an overseas client off-shoring legal work you need to be very sure about how you would like to measure the quality of the finished work-product that you receive from the Indian LPO. Such methodology of measuring quality must be put to test by application of such quality measurement parameters on the work of your own attorneys working in your on-shore office. This will allow you to test the feasibility of application of such methodology on any work product.

The most important thing is to understand the people and the environment of the country to which you are off-shoring your work; their culture and attitude, their thinking patterns and behavioral norms.

An average Indian is supposed to be a shy person who would not speak out and talk about his difficulties till he reaches the brink of the cliff. This, I believe, is not an appreciable quality in terms of western standards but the Indians perhaps cannot bring a sea change in their deep rooted attitudes over-night. Needless to say, that, such character trait of Indians is in no way indicative of the fact that they are inefficient.