Expert Witness

 

Is Covid-19 fetching more business to Legal service providers?

 

The covid-19 scenario has pushed the legal industry to the extent to submerge in the thought to evaluate the work mechanism and expand the outsourcing capabilities, without compromising on efficiency. Legal outsourcing industry, despite all the other advancements is a yet to be discovered and explored part of the legal fraternity. Covid-19 has certainly boosted the appraisement of business in the legal service providing industry.

Over the past decade,even the supremely succeeding law firms have succumbed to the reality that we survive and operate in a global marketplace. Enabling an increasing array of legal support services and higher value legal work to be outsourced offshore, technology has played its role. The legal profession is now starting to take advantage of the labour arbitrage that has been exploited by other industries for well over a decade. Many areas of civil litigation have already undergone transformation. Going by the traditional way, the attorneys occasionally used to carry out remote declarations through telephones and delivered documents in large boxes across the country. Now in this bizarre situation,offices and courts are closed, resources are not available for printing and shipping of documents, and attorneys have already begun to use video conferencing for depositions and hearings.

Thereby causing market disruption in corporations and law firms to loosen their reluctance towardsoutsourcing document review services and remote functioning of other legal work. Implementation of the outsourcing tradition is yet a distant dream despite the quantum leap in legal service outsourcing.Undeniably the legal service providers are seeing a noticeable change in customers. Specifically, legal departments and law firms are at the verge of considering and giving a serious nod to vendors for their legal matters.

Covid-19 although seem to be a seasonal wear-off, crisis situation has managed to set the standards for “the new normal” and made a statement regarding the finances to be in-short for a while. To normalise the outsourcing habit of legal work in a large-scale outsourcing, document review companieswill have to continue to probe into legal departments, for long-term projects since the acceptance of the parallel running of the outsourcing industry has been and will be an avid task. Dismay and distressthat ride along with moving away from what’s familiarand traditional is playing the biggest evil for the legal service providers to make place in the market.

The biggest hurdle for legal service providers to spread its arena has been to get the law firm and corporations onto trusting them with their confidential data. In the rat race of saving finances, thediscerned risk of something goingrecklessly wrong is indefensible and puts out a picture which results in the fall of goodwill.

Clients, legal technology experts, want cheaper, more streamlined ways to get their legal advice and ensure their compliance with the law. Whenever possible, they want technology-based solutions.We being at the heart of an information business in the greatest online information age the world has ever seen. Technology companies have seized the opportunity to create products to assist with legal compliance, law practice and related matters. Companies unaffiliated with law firms have in recent years begun providing online legal services, practice management software and litigation finance tools.

Law firms’ own tech subsidiaries will likely see more work than legal service providers, in large part because they offer the best of both worlds.There are several examples of law firms creatingtechnology-based subsidiaries. According to a report by a leading law journal, Actuate Law, “A Chicago-based boutique technology firm formed by a team of ex-BigLaw partners, announced the launch of Quointec, a subsidiary dedicated to developing technology and services for corporate clients. The law firm maintains a substantial ownership stake in Quointec, which is focused on resolving legal and compliance issues facing corporations. And last year, Reed Smith announced the launch of GravityStack, its legal technology spinoff. GravityStack creates and licenses technology products and manages services for law firm and legal department clients.”

Law firms that have created technology subsidiaries can leverage the expertise of their lawyers for marketing purposes. In addition, subsidiaries will have built-in access to a law firm’s clients apart from depleting the hesitation toward outsourcing can be eased if they know their work is going to a law firm’s subsidiary with trusted quality at a lower price point.

The legal service providers and document review companies shall continue to inch up the value chain and challenge the line of “practicing law.” Through creative alliances they will offer services that really threaten the traditional law firms, but the idea of captive tech subsidiaries might stand to be a minor threat.

The cognizance will be a challenge for the foreseeable near future, and may end up taking a full generational transition to shift the perception, as the traditional modes become fuzzy and lackluster, and leaders come from more diverse backgrounds. The perception of legal service providers is a challenge similar to the perception of business professionals living inside the ecosystems. Candidly though, legal service providers come in all sorts of shapes and flavours, and until there is a consistent standard, perception will be a challenge as quickie businesses are started and burn client relationships. The whole industry suffers.