The Dos and Don’ts of Legal Outsourcing: How Outsourcing Can Benefit Your Firm
Given the current state of the world amidst the novel coronavirus pandemic, many law firms are seeking ways to increase efficiency and outsource legal work. With an extensive amount of technological tools at our fingertips, many firms have adapted well to remote-based work. The questions then arise, how many associates do I really need to have? How many full-time legal interns are really necessary to help my firm function? Taking a hard look at the costs, business processes, and technological infrastructure of your firm can end up saving you and your firm an immense amount in the long run.
As a legal outsourcing company, we have learned many dos and don’ts through our growth. Below we describe some of the dos and don’ts of outsourcing work to both legal interns and licensed attorneys:
DO:
1. Thoroughly vet any person that is assisting you or use a platform that thoroughly vets those law students and lawyers for you.
At the end of the day, the work that any law student or lawyer produces for you is going to be delivered by your firm. That means, the work product is still representative of your firm and the type of work you provide. You want the same level of quality produced that you would complete for yourself or that you would have a full-time employee generate for you. Having these law students or lawyers thoroughly vetted by examining transcripts, resumes, writing samples, interviews, and having a mock assignment completed is a thorough way to ensure that the people completing work for you are of the highest quality.
2. Determine the type of work you want outsourced at the outset.
Whether you want someone to complete legal research for you (cutting costs by having a law student with access to Westlaw and LexisNexis), find templates from such databases and draft contracts, write legal blog posts, or simply proofread your own work product, it is important to set your own expectations at the outset. Whoever you decide to outsource work to, will be at your command and will look to you for exact directions on how they can be the most helpful to you. It is essential that you determine the type of work you want done and make it clear to the law student or lawyer with straightforward, concise instructions.
3. Analyze and approve any work product before sending to a client.
As the lawyer or firm outsourcing legal work, it is your responsibility to ensure that the work is up to your standards when providing any deliverable to a client of your own. Similar to when you have a non-lawyer, such as law student or an unlicensed individual completing work, you have the responsibility under Rule 5.3 – Responsibilities Regarding Nonlawyer Assistance of the Model Rules of Professional Conduct – to go over all work by those interns. The same should apply to any work outsourced to law students or lawyers.
4. Ensure easy communication between yourself and the person you outsource work to.
Whether you prefer communicating via email, phone, or text, make that clear to the person you outsource work to. You want to have easy access to whoever you are expecting the work product from and whoever that is wants to ensure they can reach out to you for any emergency questions. If your preferred method of communicating is over email or the phone, then indicate that to ensure that communications are never a worry within your relationship and the work product delivery process runs smoothly.
DON’T:
1. Do not allow for arbitrary deadlines.
When outsourcing work, it is essential that you do not allow for the law student or lawyer completing the work to set their own deadlines. In order to maintain efficiency and ensure you receive the work for your client on time, set deadlines at the time you provide the assignment. If you need the assignment completed by the end of the day, then indicate that in the assignment instructions. This is the only way law students and lawyers will know how to prioritize the project-based work they are completing.
2. Do not send work product to clients without first approving the content.
As described above, one of the most important elements of outsourcing legal work is ensuring that the work you send to clients is what you would send if you had done the project yourself. The work product you send is still for your clients, from your firm, thus you will likely remain liable for any work product produced.
3. Do not overlook confidentiality obligations.
Confidentiality obligations are focal to the legal industry. Ensure that before signing on with any legal outsourcing program to outsource legal work to law students or lawyers, a strict confidentiality agreement is in place. This will protect you and your firm from having any outsourced work confidentiality issues from arising.
Here at gigLAW, we have built our platform around these Dos and Don’ts, to ensure that we are providing the highest quality work to our law firm and lawyer clients. Our students are thoroughly vetted, as described above, we put in place strict confidentiality agreements, guarantee deliverables within any time period requested, and ensure the highest quality of work for lawyers’ approval to send to clients.
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