Information Filled Under 'LPO Industry News' Category
Jury Instruction Allowing Inference that Destroyed Evidence Was Unfavorable and Payment of Attorneys’ Fees and Costs Ordered as Sanction for Failure… Monday, June 28th, 2010
Medcorp, Inc. v. Pinpoint Tech., Inc., 2010 WL 2500301 (D
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Jury Instruction Allowing Inference that Destroyed Evidence Was Unfavorable and Payment of Attorneys’ Fees and Costs Ordered as Sanction for Failure…
Crispin v. Christian Audigier, Inc., 2010 WL 2293238 (C.D. Cal
Legal Process Outsourcing (LPO) Training institute in Jaipur Thursday, June 3rd, 2010MindLaw Training in news. Jaipur, Rajasthan’s first LPO company. LPO training in Rajasthan News.
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Legal Process Outsourcing (LPO) Training institute in Jaipur
Washington State Bar Association: Washington Civil Procedure: Let’s Do it Right! – How to Navigate Washington’s Civil Rules for Your Client’s Benefit May 26, 2010 8:25 AM – 4:45 PM Red Lion Hotel, Emerald Ballroom II 1415 Fifth Avenue Seattle, WA K&L Gates Partner Todd Nunn will present a discussion entitled, “Electronic Discovery: What You Must Know to Correctly Steer Your Client”. Attendees can expect to learn more about e-Discovery best practices and privilege issues for e-discovery (and discovery in general) as well as what is happening with the state rules of civil procedure and the possibility they will be amended to incorporate electronic discovery. For more information or to register, click here
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Upcoming Events
Bray & Gillespie Mgmt., LLC v. Lexington Ins. Co., 2009 WL 5218035 (M.D.
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District Court Rejects Total Dismissal of Claims, Orders Partial Dismissal and $75,000 in Monetary Sanctions for Egregious Discovery Violations
Center for Competitive Management – E-Discovery Best Practices and Compliance Guidelines (Audio Conference) January 14, 2010 2-3:15 PM ET K&L Gates partners David Cohen and Todd Nunn will co-present this discussion of how to stay on top of the rapidly changing world of electronic records, discovery, and evidence including discussion of specific topics such as recent rulings and risks associated with e-discovery, best practices for managing electronic stored information, opportunities and challenges for 2010, and methods for cutting costs and lowering data loss risks. For more information or to register, click here. Thompson Publishing – Taming the E-Discovery Beast: Proactive Measures to Slash Costs and Reduce Risks (Webcast) January 20, 2010 2 PM ET K&L Gates partners David Cohen and Julie Anne Halter will co-present this discussion focusing on proactive steps that organizations can take before litigation to reduce e-discovery exposure and proven cost control and cost reduction strategies to employ during litigation
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Upcoming Events – January
By Robert Barnes Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, December 15, 2009 The Supreme Court will decide whether employees have a reasonable expectation of privacy for the text messages they send on devices owned by their employers. The case the court accepted Monday involves public employees, but a broadly written decision could hold a blueprint for private-workplace rules in a world in which communication via computers, e-mail and text messages plays a very large role.
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Court to rule on privacy of texting
Featuring K&L Gates Partners, David R. Cohen and Dominic Bray , along with the Director of EMEA IM Marketing for HP Software, Erik Moller, this workshop addresses a myriad of issues including the risks and complexity of e-discovery and how to minimize those risks while maximizing cost savings and auxiliary benefits, European Privacy and Data Protection issues, and recommendations for best practices and solutions planning for data management, privacy and disclosure. To view this presentation, click here .
Upcoming Events – October Thursday, September 24th, 2009IQPC: Information Retention & E-Disclosure Management, Europe September 30 – October 1, 2009 Marriott Hotel Auguste Orts 3-7/Grand Place 1000 Brussels, Belgium K&L Gates partner David Cohen will present “Turning Theory Into Practice: Practical Steps to Take NOW to Reduce E-Disclosure/E-Discovery Risks and Costs” on Wednesday, September 30th at 11:00 AM. This presentation will provide a “roadmap” of practical steps to take when dealing with e-disclosure challenges, including improving records management and other concrete measures to reduce liability, exposure, and cost
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Upcoming Events – October
Is there a shift going on in the legal press? Ron Friedmann asserts that we are now in the second phase of media coverage about outsourcing. The first wave included much reporting on the risks associated with sending work to offshore providers (not surprising given what lawyers do for a living–i.e. identify and manage risk). In this new phase, the legal press is starting to get behind outsourcing. In citing a recent article in the NLJ, Friedmann notes: The article explains the proposed federal Financial Regulatory Reform, that it would increase corporate compliance cost, and that general counsels should consider using offshore lawyers to do some of the work.
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Legal Press Getting Behind Outsourced Solutions?
While China has become a powerhouse of outsourced manufacturing, India still retains a commanding lead in the outsourcing of services and business processes like LPO. This will remain true for a number of structural reasons. For starters, the English language is the dominant language of services outsourcing and clearly, India has a much larger number of English speakers. But other factors will also continue to hinder the growth of BPO and LPO in India including concerns about data security (in China, the central government still exercises a lot of control over all forms of communication and data storage.) For more on the subject, click here
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India Has Large Advantage Over China
I previously reported on the outsourcing deal struck between Rio Tinto (one of the largest mining companies in the world), and CPA Global. While many in the LPO industry are eager to hear about Rio Tinto’s experience, that will obviously need to happen over time. But a post in the AmLaw Daily today already points to some early positive signs. According to the post, Leah Cooper, the Managing Attorney at Rio who was the driving force behind the deal, had originally hoped that outsourcing to India would be a way to free up internal resources in her law department. But as she has already seen, it is a way to cut down on outside counsel fees.
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Rio Tinto Outsourcing Deal is Already Producing Savings
The unauthorized practice of law, the duty to provide competent legal counsel and properly supervise the work done by domestic and offshore contract attorneys or attorneys outside of the U.S., avoiding conflicts of interest, preserving client confidences, billing clients appropriately, steering around export controls–these are all issues discussed in a great webinar on the ethical issues raised by legal process outsourcing. Mark Ross of Law-Scribe has done a number of these. This is one of his best and worth a listen if you are interested in getting up to speed on the issues.
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Offshoring and Ethics
For the past few years, there have been signs that certain practice areas are migrating away from large law firms. Twenty years ago, large law firms were pitching one stop shopping. But as times changed, certain practice groups found it increasingly difficult to keep up with increased billing rates. For example, while many of the larger law firms developed substantial employment law and trusts and estates practices during the 1980’s, since the mid-1990’s, there has been an exodus of these practice groups to smaller and more regional law firms. Is the same thing now be happening in Intellectual Property? During the Dot.Com boom, many large law firms began setting up IP practices that were once the domain of IP boutiques. But is IP now feeling the downward price pressures that sent employment law practices looking for greener pastures? Here is one high profile example and there are certainly others.
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Is IP Trending Away From Biglaw?
There is some evidence that law firms have been adopting legal outsourcing at a slower pace than their own corporate clients. There are a variety of reasons for this ; most obviously, lawyers are not eager to send billable work to another provider, even if the client will save money. As one partner articulated to me in a recent meeting, sending even commodity work to an offshore vendor is a win, win, lose proposition for a law firm (where the corporate client saves on legal fees, the vendor generates the fees the law firm used to generate and the law firm loses revenues but retains the risk associated with the engagement). I’m not sure his calculus is correct in the long run. If GC’s are demanding rate relief and if offshoring provides a way to bring down legal fees without sacrificing quality, then some clients are going to demand it and some law firms are going to offer it. If leases or commercial contracts can be reviewed at $50 per hour, then why would a client continue to pay $300 per hour? Over time, it will be harder and harder to justify giving commodity work like this to a junior associate at a large law firm.
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Offering an Offshoring Option=Marketing Opportunity
There are several interesting articles on the “in-house counsel/outside law firm” relationship in the latest newsletter of legal consulting firm Altman Weil ( here and here .) Both consultants talk about ways for in-house counsel to achieve cost reduction by demanding it from outside counsel. They also offer some practical tips about how in-house counsel speak with about the subject with their outside providers. What really comes through in both of these articles is the need for in-house counsel and outside counsel to work closely together on their communication. In-house counsel can’t simply expect an outside law firm to hand over an answer or bring a case or a transaction to conclusion. The relationship works best when client and lawyer decide not only what will get done, but how it will get done. Furthermore, as I have been writing in this blog, many lawyers are not accustomed to thinking about their work in terms of process
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In-house/Outside Communication
An article in the London Evening Standard suggests that many Magic Circle firms have already sent legal work to India and South Africa (e.g. Allen & Overy, Clifford Chance, Eversheds, Lovells and Simmons & Simmons.) The article reports that 1000 more legal jobs may be sent to India by the end of the year. While the article does not provide a lot of concrete evidence that this is actually occurring (it mainly quotes various individuals in the legal and LPO industries), I am left with the impression that the U.K.
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Are U.K. Firms Adopting LPO More Quickly than U.S. Firms?
I can’t fault lawyers for worrying about data security. Maintaining client confidences is not only a business necessity, it is an ethical imperative for attorneys. But I still scratch my head when I talk to lawyers about offshoring IP work and they raise concerns about preserving confidentiality. “How do I know my clients’ confidential information will be protected?” As a matter of routine business practice, large multinationals have been sending sensitive information overseas for years. Any company that has chosen to outsource back office functions to India, the Philippines or China understands that data must be encrpted and that vendors need to be properly screened for compliance with appropriate security procedures. In sharp contrast, walk into a typical law office in the United States and you are likely to see lots of paper lying around. Attorneys and non-attorneys alike bring work home on lap tops which may or may not be secured . And anyone who thinks that Asians are less trustworthy than Americans, just open the newspaper and read about the latest corporate scandals right here in the good old U.S.A. Theft of trade secrets, embezzlement and complex swindling schemes are hardly un-American (just think of the names Enron, Madoff, and name the latest lawyer in your jurisdiction to be caught with his or her hand in the till). So maybe cloud computing offers the safest place for client data to be stored. In response to concerns that the National Health Service in the U.K.
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The Cloud Provides More Data Security
While patent filings may be down, appeals are up. Law.com offers an explanation : According to the NLJ, patent challenges at the Patent and Trademark Office are up 70 percent this fiscal year, which began last October. The reason for the increase, say some IP lawyers, are stingier approval rates of patents at the PTO. This fiscal year only 44 percent of patents have been approved, compared to 66 percent five years ago.
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Patent Appeals on the Rise and Charging By the Page
Paul Lippe, founder of the on-line community Legal OnRamp, has written an interesting piece on change in the legal industry . Lippe asserts that most change in society (whether it is in politics, business, etc.) is not neatly planned out. It is not like the legislative process where all stakeholders come together to discuss issues, document positions and hammer out some sort of compromise. Rather, ” most change unfolds indirectly, through action rather than consensus”. Furthermore, he asserts that “Although lawyers are very sophisticated about the content of change, they can misinterpret the process of change, because they are more inclined to look for change in consensus than in action.” Citing remarks made by the CEO of Cisco Systems at the recent Legal Tech Show, Lippe goes on to suggest that in the legal profession “…the price of reading, creating documents, finding stuff, and communicating should come down, and the price of thinking will go up.
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Welcome to the Future of Law Firms
There continues to be a large gap between what Chief Legal Officers want and what they see their law firms delivering. According to a new study by consulting firm Altman Weil ( as reported in the American Lawyer ), …25 percent of CLOs surveyed said they were putting a ‘high’ amount of pressure on their outside panel firms to change “the value proposition in legal service delivery,” as opposed to simply cutting costs… while …only five percent of CLOs surveyed said firms are serious about changing their structure.
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According to CLO’s, Most Law Firms Not Meeting the Challenge
One thing is clear if you read the interview with the Managing Attorney of Rio Tinto , a Global Mining company that made headlines a few weeks ago when it announced a large LPO deal with CPA Global : there are GC’s out there who would like to law firms to embrace offshoring with more gusto. Law firms that realize this will have a marketing edge (at least with some clients). In the interview, the Managing Attorney, Leah Cooper, said: “Of course, I’d have much preferred if a law firm had come to me and said, ‘Hey, we’ve just entered into an arrangement with a low cost provider that’s going to save you money,’” she adds. “But that didn’t happen.” Cooper also acknowleged that in order to make the deal work, that she would have to put in significant time in getting the team in India up to speed. But she does not see this as an insurmountable barrier. “For it to work, we’re under no illusions that we have to invest a lot of time in it, and at the beginning that obviously means working out a few kinks.” Critics of legal outsourcing suggest it is these kinks that will ultimately undermine the long term viability of such projects, as the hassle factor – and its associated costs – outweighs the much vaunted potential savings
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An Interview With Rio’s Managing Attorney
An interesting analysis of recent ValueNotes research appears on Integreon’s blog. Back in May, ValueNotes issued a report which concluded that LPO penetration had been relatively weak at law firms (only 3% of the surveyed firms had worked with an LPO.) ValueNotes is one of the few companies that has conducted research on the LPO industry. While Integreon suggests that this can be explained by factors other than a wholesale rejection of the concept (LPO is a nascent industry and lawyers are very slow to change), the post suggests that under-reporting may be at play. In short, individual lawyers may not be aware of what is happening at their firms. The post goes on to offer additional commentary on VN’s findings including: VN: Onshore outsourcing is more common than offshoring–Integreon: perhaps, but the decision of when and where to outsource involves a number of business factors beyond location. Most clients are not dogmatic about where their work gets done. They base their offshoring decision more on “ project complexity, availability of talent, business continuity, degree of real time communication, cost, and scalability “. VN: Cost savings is the main driver in deciding to use an LPO– Integreon: corporate clients are the main drivers of whether a law firm will employ an LPO
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Integreon Weighs in on LPO Report
! * Democrats voice concerns on Obama’s Iraq plan – Maybe they’re trying to figure out how to get more taxes out of it. * Wall Street slides after Citigroup-government deal – yeah, considering how well AmTrak and the Postal Service turned out… can you imagine a Government run bank
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The Punch List 02 28 09 – SpokeUp.com
. www.tnr.com Two weeks ago it was reported that John McCain’s campaign approved a package of enforcement-only bills drafted by Senate Republicans to use immigration as a wedge issue. [washingtontimes.com, 3/6/08] The package was described by the LA Times as “the hardest-hitting package of immigration enforcement measures seen yet — one that would require jail time for illegal immigrants caught crossing the border, make it harder for them to open bank accounts and compel them to …
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John Mccain is notorious for skipping senate votes
noticed until a drunk Ben Affleck blurted out the truth to the crowd, saying “He lives two lives but he doesn’t have a babe like Jennifer Lopez in either one of them!” Matt-Mark later held a press conference and said his real name was Norman Mailer-Daemon. Wahlberg was actually the ancient family home of the Mailer-Daemons, where the main industry was the German post office. “Our family started the guild that ran the Dead Letter Office,” said Matt-Mark.
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matt damon mark wahlberg same guy
A full-blown war has erupted in the Indian legal industry with the entry of the foreign firms seeking talent in the labor market. Firms like Clifford Chance and Allen & Overy are aggressively recruiting talent and salaries have substantially increased across the cities of India. This has pushed large domestic law firms to increase pay-outs in form of significant salary hikes some going up to even 100%
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Lawyer salaries skyrocket in India as foreign firms poach talent