Integration: External Services for High Quality Solutions
Clients no longer accept skyrocketing bills as the hours of legal work mount, so if a law firm wants to compete, it must demonstrate cost-efficiency. This may imply using contract attorneys or outsourcing research and less-specialized tasks to third- party providers.
Law remains our core business and the underlying connection of our services and deliverables. But as we start to integrate and coordinate external legal service providers, we create an opportunity to streamline our legal processes. This effort of integration requires once more a shift in mindset and a greater emphasis on business project management capabilities—improving communication, prioritizing efficiency, and engineering our external provider networks to support the meaningful integration of our legal services to meet client needs.
Outsourcing relevant legal services will enable law firms to tighten cost control, and in doing so, will strengthen competitiveness and ultimately help mitigate risks. Using specialized service providers for specific tasks will enable us to deliver higher quality at reduced cost. The lawyer will concentrate on quality control and managing interfaces, just as our clients do when managing their supply chain. Indeed lawyers will have more time and space to design sound action plans, and to work on implementing them in collaboration with the client. Thus, integrating external providers into our systems will give our service offering a greater chance of success and allow us to focus on delivering quality. It’s a win-win.
In the area of science, the times of polymaths like Leonardo da Vinci are long behind us. In industry, no manufacturer produces all elements of a product independently, and in the digital world, new software solutions are the result of many people working together. In the legal profession, the time of integrated work products is still to come.
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