Just like many other industries, the legal industry is changing rapidly in response to market demands and fast-evolving technology. Legal practices have huge potential to improve their profits through streamlining their processes, better hiring practices and improved case management handling. This is where offshored litigation support can help. Offshoring litigation support is where a client hires lawyers in another location, say the Philippines, to work for them remotely and perform routine legal services and secretarial work such as data entry, payroll, travel organisation, IT support, research and case management. This is a fast-growing career opportunity for law students and graduates in the Philippines and can include many different tasks, such as drafting (contract drafting, wills, agreements, etc.) contract review/abstraction, document review, summarization of documents, and many more. Many law firms have already embraced this strategy as a way to reduce payroll costs, due to lower salaries and a lower overhead as they work remotely via the internet or over the phone, whilst improving productivity as due to different working hours, a higher volume of work can be completed improving efficiency.
Offshoring has the added advantage of allowing firms to better match their internal staff to the needs of the in-house lawyers or attorneys. Secretarial tasks can be completed in a timely manner as attorneys no longer have to compete for secretarial and support staff as litigation support is always available through the offshoring provider. Large and long-term projects benefit from this kind of service model as the offshoring provider provides the necessary workforce whenever they are needed. Law firms no longer have to employ extra staff for busy times.
Offshoring providers operating in the Philippines have access to experienced and highly qualified staff. They handle the recruitment process and can arrange training of legal secretaries, paralegals, lawyers, and attorneys. The end goal of this business model is to minimize turnover costs while maintaining high-quality services. Consolidating such services allows the client to exercise better quality control and employee performance reviews.
The cost of legal secretaries can be $90,000 annually or more. Litigation support in the Philippines costs far less however still requires a high level of expertise and experience. Law firms can better manage their budgets and other assets through strategic offshoring of selected litigation support and services.
Final Thoughts
Many legal duties and tasks can be performed outside the law office with offshoring. Administrative tasks, secretarial work, e-discovery, document management, case management and more, can improve legal operations so that in-house teams can be re-focused and ultimately process more cases and improve profitability.