LPO refers to the process of procuring legal services from an external provider. There is nothing new about outsourcing legal services – companies have been outsourcing legal services to external law firms for ages. So why all the recent discussion about LPO?
What is new is that, today, we see the outsourcing of legal services across the globe. Technology has enabled access to offshore, low-cost pools of labour and has allowed efficient disaggregation of routine legal work which can be performed by these low-cost pools of labour. A familiar form of offshore LPO is the e-discovery service provider, who might have teams of lawyers working in India or the Philippines to perform relevance review of a major document collection for production in Canadian litigation.
LPOs began to emerge in the past decade as global corporations starting offshoring work to captive centres with large pools of skilled, low-cost labour. We now see company-owned captive centres, captive centres of law firms, and third-party providers. Some LPOs are niche players and some provide many different kinds of services, including document review services, contract drafting, transaction due diligence and legal research and analysis. The major players also offer onshore and near-shore alternatives at different price points in additional to offshore services. For example, you might have a first-pass review of documents occurring in India, with a higher level quality control review being performed by more costly Canadian lawyers in the LPO provider’s Canadian office.