Over the last five years, Mauritius has embraced some bold economic reforms that have positioned the country among the most open, competitive and lowest tax economies in the world. Capitalizing on its strategic location and relying on its sound domestic economic base, Mauritius is increasingly being viewed as a global business platform for many international players in the ICT/BPO industry.

The outsourcing industry has witnessed significant transformation over the last 5 years.
Starting with basic data entry tasks, the industry graduated to a high proportion of voice-based services and a range of back-office processing activities. The last 3-4 years have seen the scope of services expanding to include increasingly complex processes involving rule-based decision making and even research services requiring informed individual judgment.

Today, the sector faces a unique opportunity to enhance its role as a high value added service provider and capitalize on the expanding BPO landscape. The country is gradually being recognized as a centre of excellence in the areas of finance, accounting and IT services. With the onset of the LPO phenomenon, Mauritius is positioning itself as a credible destination for offshored legal works. According to Research and Markets, the global legal process outsourcing (LPO) market was worth $400m in 2010 and is expected to be worth $2.4bn by 2012 with the US accounting for more than two-thirds of the market.

What Makes Mauritius an attractive destination for LPO?

Mauritius benefits from one major unique selling point which is its hybrid legal system of French and British law. This is a result of the two consecutive colonisations of the country. The Mauritian legal education system has its roots both in UK and France hence the familiarity of local lawyers with both countries’ legal framework. This gives the Mauritian LPO industry a competitive edge against other similar players in the African region.

Mauritius has a proven track record of political stability and has developed a pro-business environment. Outsourcing of services has been possible only because of the tremendous advancements in telecommunication technology over the years. Mauritius has a strong IT infrastructure and support. This technological supports forms the backbone of this booming outsourcing industry. Moreover, the country has also promulgated its Data Protection Act and is working with the European Union for the “Adequacy Finding” thus ensuring the safe transfer of sensitive and personal data.

The LPO industry in Mauritius is poised for future development. While India and Philippines have proved their mettle and are recognized as mature centres, Mauritius can be used as a complementary destination targeting both English and French speaking markets.

By The New Lawyer

Mallesons Stephen Jaques will outsource legal work to India as it responds to cost pressures in the competitive legal environment.

The firm announced today that it had signed a deal with US-Based legal outsourcing company Integreon, and will use 200 of the company’s trained lawyers in India for legal work.

The firm will outsource some of its low level legal work such as document review, document processing, due diligence, and discovery relating to litigation. The Integreon team will consist of experienced staff members, including forensic experts and individuals with law and business degrees, supported by teams of lawyers, as case needs dictate.

LPO is common practice around the world. Integreon already has nine of the top 10 global law firms, and 32 of the top 50 AM Law firms as clients.

But managing partner Tony O’Malley describes the deal as a “watershed moment” for the Australian legal services industry.

“We are making efficiency our business, whilst responding to cost pressures in the highly competitive legal market, ” he said.

O’Malley said Mallesons was always looking to innovate a service offering.

“Most general counsel have in their top two or three things to manage getting their costs down and their external costs down with their providers. What we’re trying to do is respond to that pressure by working to clients to give them a legal outsourcing process solution that helps not only with a cost but also at times a better quality solution in particular areas of work, he told Boardroom Radio.

He said the firm made a conscious decision to take some leadership in this area.

“This agreement will deliver the sourcing alternatives and efficiency that our clients are demanding, and enable us to maintain the oversight and control necessary to deliver the level of legal advice for which we are known. LPO is already common practice elsewhere in the world, and it’s time that our clients have access to, and benefit from this innovative business practice.”

Bob Gogel, CEO of Integreon said, “Mallesons is leading the charge for bold innovation in legal services delivery in Australia. By fully evaluating and understanding the evolving needs of their clients and embracing the business-model transformation necessary to meet those needs, Mallesons continues to exhibit the bold thinking that is a hallmark of leading global law firms.”

Through a due diligence process, Mallesons said it chose Integreon for its proven quality, consistency, transparency and reliability. Of the legal process outsourcing providers evaluated by Mallesons, Integreon exhibited the greatest ability to scale globally to meet clients’ constantly evolving needs, it said.

Source: The New Lawyer

By Mark Dubois

I always thought that outsourcing, off shoring and other such nefarious processes were ways that big businesses screwed working stiffs by sending their work to the cheapest place it could be done anywhere in the world. Quite a few years ago, I was in Ireland and a friend with a huge business was showing me how he purchased hard and soft goods (everything from lumber to computer programming) from all over the world. Wood was cheapest from Siberia. Programming was pretty cheap in Cuba.

I told my friend that this was all well and good, but that I was a lawyer, and like sex workers, lawyers needed to be up close and personal with their clients. I told him that this stuff would never catch on for knowledge work like legal research, analysis, document drafting, and all the other fun stuff we did. I should have listened to him.

A few years ago, Indian entrepreneurs hit on the idea that they could provide cheap and efficient office work for U.S. companies. They started slowly, providing such simple services as fax cover sheets, simple dictation and form letters. But it was not long before they began doing income tax work for large companies serving domestic consumers, sophisticated back office work for businesses of all sorts, contracts, leases and such for large retail enterprises, and pretty sophisticated work for law firms and corporate counsel.

Next time you take a break, Google “legal process outsourcing.” You will get over 1 million hits. Many of the leaders are in Europe where they are a generation ahead of us in this stuff. Once the concept of a European economic union was understood and implemented, it was no great leap to push the borders further to include knowledge work wherever it could be found and purchased cheaply.

I understand that intellectual property work can be done pretty efficiently in Australia where the cost of living is lower but the IP regime is very similar to ours; some U.S. firms are sending stuff there. I investigated one domestic law firm and learned that their call center was in Costa Rica. And a few months ago, Thomson Reuters (think West Legal Publishing) bought something called Pangea3, which is now a domestic portal where U.S. firms can manage legal process outsourcing to India.

If you think that this stuff is all limited to large firms and big cities, I can tell you that there are Connecticut law firms that outsource great quantities of routine legal work—motions, defaults, affidavits of debt, and such. Anywhere that you can find English-speaking folks with access to electricity, you can set up a back office and practice law.

Of course, there are ethical issues that must be wrestled with.

Confidences must be protected. Conflicts must be avoided. Clients must be informed, though just how much of the business process needs to be disclosed is still a matter of debate. And I have seen informal opinions both ways from my former colleagues in bar regulation as to whether outsourced work can be “upcharged” or must be passed along on a dollar-for-dollar basis.

The ABA Ethics 2020 Committee is wrestling with some of these issues.

But technology moves with the speed of electrons while rule regimes limp along playing catch up. Thus, by the time we have a comprehensive set of rules, there will be new technologies and new questions.

During the year that the state Judicial Branch committee on lawyer advertising (an enterprise that is very technology sensitive) met and debated regulating Internet ads and such, several new technologies had been invented (RSS feeds, webcasts and blogs) and more (Twitter, social networking) have arrived since.

It’s a brave new world. And we have the chance to be at the cusp of change. But the leading edge of a wave can be a scary place if it turns out to be a tsunami.

Mark Dubois, the former chief disciplinary counsel for Connecticut, is now an attorney at the New London firm of Geraghty & Bonnano.

By Mark Smith

There’s no escaping the ‘o’ word in the legal profession at the moment, and for the past 18 months, the stories in the UK legal press have just kept on coming. Lots of words, but what’s really happening – and what’s going to happen?

Does outsourcing spell Armageddon for the legal profession? Will all the jobs be swept up and done offshore? Will process and technology decimate the practice of law? Or will the hype die down and the business model be exposed as simply not working for the legal profession? The outsourcers might find small niches, but not penetrate the mainstream…

I’ve been connected with the outsourcing industry for about twelve years. In practice I spent six years as a technology and outsourcing lawyer, and then spent four years in a global outsourcer as corporate counsel. I moved into the business for the same company and after I left, I spent a year leading the onshore team for the legal processing division of another global outsourcer. So now, with the news full of A&O’s support centre in Belfast, and the continuing story of CMS Cameron McKenna’s large-scale deal with Integreon, it seemed like the right time to offer my thoughts on the topic, particularly as lots of the comments flying around seem to me to be made by people who’ve never seen an outsourced operation, let alone have any understanding of the underlying business models.

So buckle up, here we go… (my blogging guide did suggest being controversial – how am I doing?)

Let’s start with the observation that the fundamental principle of contracting with a third party to provide services that are non-core to your business is pretty well-established. Whether it’s finance and accounting, payroll, logistics, manufacturing or customer services, many of the largest companies in the world have outsourcing well-established as a critical part of their business model. It has been going on a long time, and the long-term success of the big global outsourcing providers suggests that this approach does work.

With providers leveraging both lower costs from economies of scale and labour arbitrage and providing the service using highly specialised staff, best practice process and technology the business case can be compelling. On the other hand, of course concerns about data privacy, potential loss of control, cultural differences, brand damage and the political and social implications of outsourcing jobs appear to make the decision less clear cut.

So while the underlying business model clearly has pros and cons, with the profession hit hard by the recession, with traditionally high labour and property cost-base, and incumbent providers of legal services potentially facing a new wave of competition as a result of deregulation, it’s surely no surprise that outsourcing has finally become a reality.

Where I think the most interesting questions lie is not around the question of whether outsourcing will succeed, but what types of work are most suitable for outsourcing and will provide the biggest benefits for law firms.

To investigate this, a bit of clarity is required about what actually constitutes legal process outsourcing (LPO). One of the problems with the hype surrounding outsourcing in the legal profession is that any outsourcing gets labelled as LPO, when in fact, many deals don’t actually include the outsourcing of legal work.

A helpful place to start is to think of the firm in terms of back, middle and front office, terms that are often used in the financial services industry. The term ‘back office’ means those parts of the law firm that run the business, but are largely invisible to the client – accounts, HR etc. By contrast the meaning of ‘middle office’ is a little more fuzzy, but I think of that as those support functions which either directly support the provision of legal advice (such as legal research, knowledge management) or are in other ways visible to clients (business development etc), but are not the actual service that the client pays for. Front office work is much clearer – the actual provision of legal advice.

So, with a sprinkle of added clarity (that if a law firm outsources some of its finance function, it’s not LPO in my book), what do I think are the prospects for outsourcing in the profession?

If we start with the back office, this at first glance would seem the obvious place to start. Generally speaking, it’s non-core and won’t provide much in the way of competitive advantage (in fact, by contrast there are plenty of firms that have challenges with billing) for law firms. The challenge is however, that for all but the largest firms, the scale of the accounting function is not large enough for the economics to make sense on a dedicated outsourcing project.

The answer of course would be a shared service that law firms could simply plug in to. The difficulty here is that law firm IT systems are incredibly diverse, and a lot of them have been customised and patched together over the years, so simply moving to a new (outsourced) platform will not be easy. I’m sure this conundrum will be cracked, but I am not sure whether anyone is there at the moment.

Looking then at the middle office, the raft of deals among UK firms at the moment suggests there is appetite for outsourcing here, and looking at parallel operations in other sectors, there’s no question the model can work.

At the business process outsourcing provider where I was working last year, their research and analytics function had over 1,500 employees, 70% of whom had advanced degrees (MBAs, PhDs etc). The quality of their output was excellent, and they provided comparable services (pitch support, business intelligence, research etc) for blue-chip corporates, investment banks and management consultancies. The team was led by someone who set up McKinsey‘s knowledge management centre in India, and I certainly felt confident that a lot of that team’s expertise was transferrable.

The final area is of course the legal work itself, and this is perhaps the most emotive area for lawyers. There is a huge split of opinion here with, on one side, service providers who are selling, keen to make the most of their credentials, and confidently talking of their ability to ‘move up the value chain’ (by which they mean demonstrating they are capable of taking more and more complex work).

On the other side are many lawyers who, having spent many years working hard to join and progress in the profession, do not believe their work can be done by less qualified personnel, especially those outside the jurisdiction.
So what’s the truth?

Well, I think the starting point is to establish that in the world of volume legal services (think conveyancing, remortgages, personal injury litigation etc) legal work has been successfully outsourced and offshored for sometime. Undoubtedly if you had asked the question ten years ago whether this would have been possible, the majority of the profession would have shaken their heads and exchanged knowing glances.

These days, my experience is that talking to lawyers, many now see how an outsourcing model could work for certain types of legal work – “but mine is too complex/specialised/personal!”

My view is that there is a spectrum of complexity for legal work, and at the very bottom end (low complexity) more of this can and will be automated – seeing some of the latest document assembly tools is a good reminder of progress here.

At the next layer of complexity, there is a huge scope for the application of process to make the legal work more efficient. Having done some process mapping engagements for law firms, I can confidently state that when you get a process standardised and down on paper, the opportunities to improve it are many.

Improving process is not of course synonymous with outsourcing, and I expect in the next few months there will continue to be a huge rise in process re-engineering engagements at law firms (and in in-house departments) without perhaps those firms being ready to outsource.

This work will ultimately be capable of being outsourced (mapping and documenting a process makes outsourcing much easier), but whether or not this happens will depend very much on the individual firms, their cultures, their business models and their financial situations as well as the sales reach and delivery capacity of the service providers.

At the top level, there is of course highly specialised work that does not lend itself to process standardisation or outsourcing. With the blurring of the boundaries between the professions, the opportunities for top-end lawyers to provide advice that is strategic in nature, but perhaps not technically legal advice, will grow.

Finally, as one of the people leaving comments on the Legal Week article on Richard Susskind’s appointment to Integreon’s client board noted, all outsourcing deals have to go through transition before they then stabilise and start delivering to service levels and providing the expected value. Even at this stage, it takes time to realise the full benefits, and so expect a raft of noise in the media if some of the deals experience a few wobbles to begin with.

Personally speaking, having had the privilege of having been to several offshore outsourcing centres in Asia (as well as UK operations) and seen them in action, I would have a lot of confidence that long-term, back and middle office services could be delivered effectively by the top outsourcing providers. For the front office work, I suspect success will depend much more on the type of work being outsourced and the provider’s experience.

To wrap up, I’m not saying that outsourcing is the right or wrong choice for any firm. I do believe that the business model has been proven in other industries and that certain functions in a law firm are sufficiently similar to other industries that there’s no reason why the profession should be any different. In one flavour or another, outsourcing is here to stay – watch this space to see how it evolves.

Mark Smith has worked in private practice, in-house, as a consultant to law firms and blogs at The Intelligent Challenge.

Source: LegalWeek.com

As corporations and legal firms in the US, Europe and Australia cut overhead costs, legal jobs, such as electronic document management, are expected to shift offshore. This is partly driven by new and exciting technologies and access to outsourcing firms that have organized themselves into specialist go-to destinations that offer compelling economic reasons to investigate what’s on offer.

The next big wave of Outsourcing will be LPO. Legal processes of major firms in First world companies will provide rich pickings for LPO firms in India and the Philippines. Indian LPO work is expected to rise at 40 per cent annually.

It is estimated that the addressable global market for LPO is worth around US $20 billion.

An example is Thomson Reuters who are expanding its legal business process outsourcing (LPO) operations in the Philippines to address the growing demand from US law firms for subcontracted research services. As with other forms of outsourcing, a key benefit that can be delivered to an organisation by LPO is cost. A lot of mundane legal work, such as reviewing documents, is passed onto paralegals to perform. Australian organisations can pay up to $150 – $200 an hour for a paralegal. By outsourcing this work, and depending on the size of the project, savings of up to 50 percent will be realized and the work will be done by a fully qualified lawyer.

The Global LBO Conference will be held in Delhi, India on November 13th and 14th in Delhi, India.

LPO (Legal Process Outsourcing) refers to the practice of corporations or law firms obtaining legal support services from an outside law firm or legal support solutions company, operating in a low cost location such as India or the Philippines. As opposed to other areas of outsourcing, Australian industry and organisations have been slow to accept the outsourcing of legal processes.

Maurie Dobbin, Director and co founder of outsourcer Legal Resources, admits that the going was tough, “When we first setup business the level of acceptance in Australia was very low, we received most of our initial enquiries from the United States. It’s only now that the industry is receiving the recognition that it deserves.”

As well as issues concerning security and confidentiality, people questioned the ethical and professional standards of lawyers in the different outsourced locations. Even though India has exactly the same legal foundations as Australia, “We experienced a lot of prejudice in terms of the perceived professionalism of lawyers in India. People questioned the ability of Indian lawyers to evaluate documents in line with Australian regulatory requirements”, Dobbin adds.

LPO providers offer services in the areas of document review, legal research and writing, drafting of pleadings and briefs, and patent services outsourcing.

According to research conducted by Evalueserve, there were over 5,200 professionals in the LPO industry, as on April 2010, in India and the Philippines, contributing an annual revenue of USD 300 million, and this is expected to reach 18,000 professionals with an annual revenue of USD 960 million by December 2015. The recent recession made businesses very conscious about cost and finding ways to reduce operating expenses. Organisations also have greater faith and sense of security in LPO. “These days with the way electronic document review is managed you can have all the security you need. There is no down side or risk that can’t be managed.”

As with other forms of outsourcing, a key benefit that can be delivered to an organisation by LPO is cost. Dobbin highlights that a lot of mundane legal work, such as reviewing documents, is passed onto paralegals to perform. He says, “ Australian organisations can pay up to $150 – $200 an hour for a paralegal. By outsourcing this work, and depending on the size of the project, you will be paying half the amount for the services of a fully qualified lawyer.”

The type of organisation, according to Dobbin, that has most to gain from an LPO arrangement is a large trading enterprise that needs to manage a lot of contracts or legal forms. Most of the work is mundane reviewing, which can easily and securely managed offshore. Legal extraction is another area that is gaining in popularity. For example most property leases are very similar, its just the specific clauses that are different, these can easily be extracted and highlighted for negotiation purposes.

Legal Process Outsourcing is certainly here to stay and as Aussie companies become more familiar with its benefits and less concerned about the perceived risks, we should see greater adoption in the market.

KPO Consultants announced its 2010 annual conference. The Global LBO Conference will be held in Delhi, India on November 13th and 14th in Delhi, India.

Legal Process Outsourcing (also known as LPO services) refers to the practice of a law firm or corporation obtaining legal support services from an outside law firm or legal support services company.

This conference is a unique event aiming to bring together key executives with extensive interests in the legal outsourcing industry. It brings together not only law firm partners, in-house counsels, LPO vendors, but also LPO trainers and educators to one location across two days to discuss, deliberate, and learn about the challenges and opportunities posed by current practices in the industry. The conference also allows delegates to meet face-to-face with service providers and country representatives from countries across Asia, Africa, U.S.A., and U.K. to discover how best to take advantage of a globalised marketplace.

The conference will feature some of the leading thought leaders in the LPO space.

For more information visit the Conference website: www.globallpoconference.com

Last month, Pangea3, one of India’s largest providers of legal process outsourcing (LPO) services, became the first India-based LPO to enter the legal services market in Australia in a tie up with Sydney and Melbourne based legal firm Advent Lawyers. The two firms will collaborate on lower level paralegal type work including contract drafting, compliance, risk management, mergers and acquisitions due diligence, litigation and intellectual property support. Perth based legal firm Balance Legal is also a new entrant into the LPO market.

These moves represent the first steps for Indian-based LPOs who are seeking to expand beyond their traditional markets of the US and UK.

In an unrelated move, Thomson Reuters is expanding its legal business process outsourcing (LPO) operations in the Philippines to address the growing demand from US law firms for subcontracted research services.

The company, with 1,800 employees in the Philippines, today will increase its headcount by 300 legally trained people. The company’s legal LPO business has over 14,600 employees around the world, with about 1,500 having law degrees.

“The legal business is our second largest in terms of the number of employees and by revenues, but it’s also number one in profits,” Thomson Reuters president for US core legal business Vin Caraher said.

“The team of employees at the new site will contribute to content processing and production, including compiling, organizing, converting and linking content for Thomson Reuters legal online services and print products around the world,” the company said in a statement.