But Isn't Sending Legal Work to Low Cost/Offshore Locations Still an Innovative Approach?
No. Not unless your offshore provider is offering an underlying technology to drive value to the work being performed. Most Legal Process/Service organizations are making nice margins on performing all commercial transactions manually, and leveraging Excel spreadsheets to capture the results.
This methodology is completely outdated for modern information needs, and provisions captured within Excel are static the minute they are entered in the spreadsheet. Classifying contractual provisions in this way does not provide the flexibility needed to coexist with evolving contractual relationships. When new information is needed, such documents need to be reopened, and a new cell needs to be created and reviewed for quality control. There is no way to “future proof” a manual review, to know what you may need to know in the future. Things just change too frequently—think of regulatory changes, world events and even policy changes within the organization itself.What new technology allows for is the querying of the system to find needed information without having to reopen and reread documents. Simply teach the system through processing examples and providing feedback on what you’re looking for, and it will search your entire portfolio of documents and identify which contain that information and which do not.
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