Amitabh Sharma, Features Coordinator

Technology has shrunk the world to a global village; outsourcing is now the buzzword that is changing the job markets globally. Voice is the first level of offshoring, which is now moved up to knowledge-based jobs.

Since outsourcing has significant savings for companies, this concept is gaining favour across a spectrum of industries.

Certainly, as mounting legal costs create a cause for concern, outsourcing litigation support activity is being seen as a viable option, especially since firms can get their work done for one third of the cost incurred on their home turf.

Litigation Support Systems

The legal battles fought in courtrooms are usually backed up by painstaking research. It involves scanning through voluminous data from a variety of sources such as journals, books, and so forth. Therefore, creating an effective database system, with data captured from paper, indexing and coding the same is time-consuming yet crucial work that can make or break a case. It's primarily this kind of work that is being offshored.

Administrative work

Currently, legal outsourcing includes two broad categories - administrative or secretarial work, and legal research. The former comprises a gamut of activities ranging from legal transcription, archiving, data capture from hard copy sources and converting the same into digital formats, word processing and so forth.

When creating legal databases, every piece of evidence is scanned and put into a database. However, this has to be done by someone who is legally trained. Clients of lawyers would record their statements and send it to the lawyer, as consultation fees are high in the United States of America. The transcription of these tapes is outsourced.

For transcription activities, a graduation in any stream would suffice. However, what is paramount is an excellent command over English. Several companies conduct training programmes for fresh incumbents as well to orient them to the specific nuances of the work.

Legal research activities

Legal research on the other hand includes work requiring knowledge of law, such as brief writing. This is an upper-end activity and is highly specialised.

Companies are also looking out for people who can write patents and legal documents. A lot of pharmaceutical companies are outsourcing the same.

Confidentiality issues

Since legal work can be of a highly sensitive nature, confidentiality issues come into play. While the Law Society, United Kingdom, holds that the liability of outsourced work will remain with an English law firm, clients from the United States expect Business Process Outsourcings (BPOs) to create stringent safeguards to protect critical information.

In some firms, outsiders can't enter the lab where transcription work takes place. People can't copy text from computers. They are configured to prevent reproduction of material and help organisations operate under extremely tight security.

Client companies outsourcing such work conduct stringent interviews before any approvals.

Career Opportunities

Although legal outsourcing work is currently a niche segment of the information technology enabled services industry, it can be a lucrative career avenue for a well-qualified incumbent. Fresh incumbents start out as legal transcriptionists from where they can move on to become assistant editors, editors, group leaders, quality analysts and eventually managers.

While low-end work can be easily outsourced, high legal research work requires candidates with legal knowledge such as lawyers or retired judges.

Since the American legal system is different, hard-core legal work has to be undertaken with extreme caution, warn industry insiders, for it requires in depth and meticulous knowledge of the way the American legal system operates. Currently, however, mostly low-end work is being outsourced owing to the plethora of talent available for such a work profile.

amitabh.sharma@gleanerjm.com