Essential Guidelines for Outsourcing Legal Support Services

Just before you begin working with a legal process outsourcing company, there are numerous of factors for you to take into consideration with regard to legal support services. These consist of:

1. Assessing the quality and credibility of the company;

2. Examining the company’s track record and reputation;

3. Carrying out reference checks;

4. Questioning regarding the company’s employment as well as training policies;

5. Vetting the skills of the people carrying out the tasks; and

6. Meeting with the core management team.

Visiting the LPO company’s site is important because it allows you to see firsthand the facilities and resources that they have in place. It also allows you to meet the team members who will be working on your project. This can help you assess the quality of their work and build trust.

It’s wise to put together guidelines for the review team and engage in consistent conferences and conversations with them. It is essential to set up proper procedures and keep a record of questions and answers between the 2 parties.

Should you present follow-up guidelines to the legal process outsourcing company, ensure that you keep a record of that too. This trail is a way to make sure that an attorney is overseeing the guidance that is being provided to clients. This is important because it ensures that the client is getting legal advice from a qualified attorney.

Assure the quality of tasks and the right privacy, non-use, and non-disclosure contracts are in place with the LPO company and its subcontractors. Make sure your legal outsourcing company can effectively segregate client data.

How Should Billing Be Taken Care of while outsourcing legal support services?

The procedures regarding how billing of LPO expenses ought to be taken care of are not that apparent. Nevertheless, there are basically two views that are surfacing.

Attorneys typically charge clients for LPO services as pass-through costs, meaning they can only charge the direct cost of outsourcing plus a fair distribution of operating expenses.

Attorneys can consider LPO tasks as part of the legal services they provide to their clients. If an attorney chooses to outsource LPO tasks, they can add the direct expenses of outsourcing to their bill, as long as they are responsible for the quality of the work and the overall cost is reasonable.

Regardless of the approach, the attorney must share with the client the billing basis for the outsourced solutions before contracting for legal support from an outsourcing company.