Stratifying the Work

Before contemplating which work to outsource and to whom, legal departments need to regularly assess if any legal involvement is necessary, at all. We all want to help internal business clients with their contracts, but sometimes legal becomes a sort of a crutch for the business and finds itself completely overloaded.

At the very base of the triangle is the large volume of work that is not complex and frankly requires no involvement from the legal department. This sort of contracting work can be handled by the business owners by following some simple guides and pre-populated templates. The next level up is the work that the in-house legal professionals, either junior attorneys or paralegals, should stop handling because the work becomes quite predictable and stops being challenging. That work is conducive to documenting in a playbook and can rather easily be

Fig. 1 Stratification of work

outsourced to a legal process outsourcing company, which utilizes low-cost experi­enced legal professionals across a variety of skill levels.

The next level up is the premise of this whole article. It is the combination of high-level law firm legal services with the operational efficiencies of an LPO. This work should be the type that is commonly handled by law firms, but could benefit from the recurring themes and learnings’ making the delivery of the legal services more predictable and efficient. While playbooks are very helpful, the law firms are in a position to make judgment calls and legal advisory assessments, such that playbooks are not the only basis for the work delivery.

Finally, there are those transactions that require the subject-matter expertise of legal experts and the unique business insight that only the in-house legal team can bring. Regardless of the changes in the legal services delivery models, there will always be the need for these most complex transactions to be handled by certain experts at law firms or by those legal advisors closest to the business.

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