In the present legal scenario, a growing trend is outsourcing legal services to third-party providers. This has helped law firms around the world in a number of ways. The first is the decrease in costs of legal services without compromising on the quality of services.
This has, in turn, led to increasing in profit margins for the law firms which can then offer competitive rates to their clients. By outsourcing repetitive and tedious tasks, lawyers can focus on the more important court appearances and analysis of materials collected by researchers.
A few examples will prove this point. Immigration lawyers outsource the preparation of forms necessary for processing the case. Civil litigators largely spin-off records research and review while class action lawsuits might entail parceling out the work of sending notices and claims classification.
Outsourcing the structuring of initial drafts of contracts, as well as due diligence work, can benefit transactional lawyers. With the stabilization of the legal outsourcing sector, lawyers are outsourcing writing of appellate briefs. All these require high skill sets and an enhanced level of professional expertise.
However, there is one common thread that runs through all of them. There’s a need for stringent security systems in place at LPO firms. This ensures the privacy of client data. This is one aspect that lawyers take seriously about their outsourcing partner while evaluating the competence levels.
How do lawyers make sure that data will be secure when outsourcing legal services?
Evaluating Security Levels – Evaluating the data security infrastructure provided by the outsourced agency is of utmost importance. However, this depends on the type of work you delegate, as security and privacy requirements of all data are not standard.
If you outsource research work or even prepare for a write-up on a legal issue, there should be data security in place. However stringent data security is setup up in such matters as immigration, taxation or bankruptcy litigation.
Strictly Following Outsourcing Norms – Amidst growing concerns about data security, lawyers should strictly follow the rules as laid down by statutory bodies when outsourcing legal services. This is in addition to lawyers’ obligation to maintain client confidentiality. By asking a few questions and checking the infrastructure in place before signing on the outsourcing contract can solve a few problems.
Some common points are – do employees sign confidentiality agreements, whether strict supervision and quality control checks on data security is being regularly carried out, procedures in place for ensuring the security of private data and those in place for preventing physical theft or misuse of data. Most importantly, has the company ever faced any security breach in the past and if so measures taken to plug the leaks.
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Apart from legal firms, companies outsourcing their legal processes should be extra cautious about data security because of the present environment of rampant business espionage.
