Challenges for LPOS in India.....................................

CHALLENGES BEFORE LPOS IN INDIA

STARTING an LPO in India is challenging. Despite the BPO boom, the outsourcing of legal
work has been slower to catch on in the country for various reasons. The most important
challenge to the newly-born sector is the need for Indian lawyers to pass US Bar exams, conflict
of interest rules and data security. Legal outsourcing is different from any other knowledge
process outsourcing in a fundamental sense. In most jurisdictions lawyers have to be qualified
and enrolled in order to advise their clients. Lawyers have to be licensed to practice law (within a
certain jurisdiction). Hence legally, one cannot advise, as a lawyer, on laws one is not licensed
to practice. Similarly, one cannot wholly sub-contract one's legal work to non-lawyers in other
jurisdictions Still the work is of a secretarial nature and includes patent drafting, legal research,
contract review and monitoring. However, experts are hoping to receive high-end sophisticated
contracts, which require a strong legal base of international standards.

LPOs in the country today face two major challenges. First is globalization of legal services.
Most LPOs only have a single geography delivery center. However, the trend in the market is for
multiple location options to match the service and client requirements, hedging wage inflation,
and time zones. The second challenge is raising capital for growth. Building teams, infrastructure
and processes capable of serving the most demanding professionals is costly and many LPOs
are not able to access the capital required to compete at the highest level.

Initially, the recession caused a slowdown in new LPO projects as customers focused on crisis
management and put outsourcing initiatives on hold. However, the landscape has now changed
and LPO is benefiting significantly as cost pressures bite and businesses evaluate new strategies
(including outsourcing) to deal with the new economic reality.

With the legal industry growing rapidly, legal process outsourcing has been identified as
a compelling strategy to achieve business objectives. The recent financial crisis is a trigger that
has increased expectations in this area and most predictions point to the growth of offshore
outsourcing in the coming years. LPOs in India thus have a challenge and an opportunity at
hand.