The decomposition of legal work into discreet task has always fascinated me as in house lawyer. The hypothesis was that by decomposing, or breaking down repetitive legal work into tasks, one could train non-lawyers to perform those tasks.
For example, one of the most repetitive tasks as a media lawyer for NBC and Telemundo was responding to requests by production to use video or images without a license or permission. The defense for this in news and sports is the fair use of the content. The analysis is too complicated for busy deadline fighting producers to learn. But an intern from law school or any intelligent person could easily learn it and apply it systematically. The methodology is simply breaking down the analysis into modules or task clusters.
Once the process of decomposing legal process begins to gain momentum, the resulting clusters or modules will become more or less standardized. These modules can be outsourced to legal process outsourcing (LPOs). The LPOs will bid for them based upon price, their available infrastructure (talent and systems) and past performance.
It is not inconceivable that these modules become units or widgets that can be processed in different parts of the world at different prices and smoothly supervised and reassembled by the client. This would in effect make legal services a wide open global opportunity. It would in effect erode the monopoly of locality and jurisdiction.
Are you ready? How do you prepare for this?
Jorge Colón's Blog 
Great post Jorge. I like the idea of outsourcing where applicable. It frees up time for the legal practitioner to do the work they really should be doing, and not the mundane administrative tasks. However, my only concern with LPO’s is how do you maintain quality control over what is being put out by them, if they are doing it themselves? If they are not doing it themselves, and it is being reviewed by the legal practitioner (i.e. they have to read over each email response), how much time is really being saved?
What are your thoughts on this?
Thanks, Simon.
I don’t have any direct evidence how good these LPOs are. I have read many articles expressing that quality control is not really an issue with most established LPOs. My understanding is that most LPOs focus mostly on routine legal work. In some cases LPOs are becoming better than the law firms that are outsourcing to them. They are also qualifying Indian lawyers in the UK and USA so as to bypass UPL challenges.
I must admit I’m much better at observing trends. For example, a few years ago, I heard lawyers (and even programmers) complaining that outsourcing to India was not productive because the work had to be checked and corrected. However, I didn’t really pay attention to these complaints in my analysis. My hypothesis was that these sort of problems would be fixed with time and sometimes very quickly! LPOs know they must adapt quickly to correct mistakes and continuously increase quality. From most accounts they’re moving much faster than we are adapting to their presence.
But please don’t take my word for it and research these LPOs. http://lposource.blogspot.com/ Good luck with law school.
Jorge
Your post raises several interesting points.
1) In some of the more progressive corporations, I would suggest the decomposition process has actually been undertaken in a reverse form; the business decides which areas of the contract require legal input and assigns only those elements to them. Our analysis suggests that only around 15 – 20% of the content of an average contract is actually related to strictly ‘legal’ issues, so why should they decide who does what?
2) In other, more traditional environments, you are right that there has been a strong trend by the GC to try to focus expensive legal resource onto higher value activity and to ’empower’ others to manage routine tasks. Those empowered resources may be within the law department, or more commonly now they are within the relevant business unit. Often, this is achieved with the support of automation (which means continued visibility and control).
3) Today, there is a growing wave of the outsourcing of such tasks. While few companies advertise the fact that they are outsourcing contract development, review and management, our work at IACCM gives us insight to the scale of both captive center offshoring and full outsourcing. Indeed, we are beginning to see much larger scale examples of full contract BPO. Much of this is to India, but interestingly there are growing centers in Central America and Eastern Europe.
Any upgrading of efficiency demands the sort of decomposition you mention; companies that don’t do this will not only suffer from cost disadvantages, but more importantly they will struggle to compete on broader ‘ease of doing business’, especially in areas like cycle times and commercial creativity.
Thank you, Timothy. I have been reading your blog as per Daniel Nagel’s suggestion. I find your work to be inspiring in its accuracy and foresight.
If we extrapolate even further, as decomposition becomes a more defined skill set, it will allow for efficient AI systems to evolve that perform most routine tasks. Of course, this is a hypothesis. I’m much better at picking World Cup upsets, including Uruguay and Holland in the semi-finals! 🙂