Whether you call it legal process outsourcing (LPO) or legal services outsourcing (LSO), there’s little doubt that the concept of outsourced services is currently a hot topic in the e-discovery and litigation support worlds.
As little as five years ago, GCs and law firms routinely kept most of their specialized legal work, such as managing document review, in-house. Most felt there was no reason to do otherwise—they could do the work, do it well, and maintain end-to-end control over the entire legal matter. Today, however, the economics have changed and outsourcing is much more common, but many old-school legal professionals are still wary of the practice for reasons that focus primarily on control. They fear that vendors will fail to grasp the nuances of their business, the quality of results will be poor, the work won’t be performed in a timely manner and the security of the data may be at risk.
