Non-core activities take up a substantial time of an organization with no additional advantages. Therefore, various business processes not core to the organizational line of activity are being outsourced. This improves the focus on the core activities and improvises them. With an initial focus on outsourcing sales, marketing, pay-roll, now the shift is on the outsourcing of the knowledge based activities. These include finance and accounting, medical transcription, Research and Analysis, Intellectual Property Research and host of “Legal Services”.
OBJECTIVES OF OUTSOURCING LEGAL WORK:
Well – the prime objective is to achieve superior quality services at lower costs and least involvement. But the question is what if the work quality or confidentiality is compromised. Okay, try “Head Hunting”. You would want a right man doing the right job. Head-hunting is searching for a right man to fit a right job. It is a good idea to ensure that you rely on a vendor (person either being a company or a group of individuals providing you with the services you need) having quality commitment at right (if not the least) cost having sufficient resources to do your job well. When you are concerned with the legal tasks, data confidentiality is yet another factor you got to be concerned about. How secure is the vendor’s site? If you are working on a larger project, you would also want to have somebody doing your job with some prior experience because you do not like to be an experimental material. Another vendor attribute is his financial stability, his responsiveness and the transparency of his work. When you are outsourcing your work abroad, you may want to consider other factors like job pay, political stability, country policy, talent pool, and experience and very importantly the honesty of vendor.
So the first and foremost objective is – “improving the quality of work, reducing costs by planting right man doing the right job with pre-determined vendor attributes.”
Steps to outsourcing Legal Work:
First of all identify and segregate your core and non-core activities. Out of non-core activities pick up those activities you feel burden you while adding nothing extra to your work. You know your internal processes and the operations. But the vendor doing your job does not know about it. Can you summarize your internal processes..like (a). First this (b). Then that, and (3). So on…
Think of the basics of the management – planning, organizing, staffing, leading and controlling.
First of all you planned what you want to outsource.
Then you organized your activities as core and non-core activities.
You picked up a vendor after identifying some attributes which you defined looking to your work.
So now go ahead and tell your vendor what you expect out of him. You got to tell your vendor what do you expect him to do and how should the job be done. To make this successful you may want to plan out your work with predetermined goals.
After taking all this trouble, you need to know how well the vendor faired to fulfill your expectations. To know this, you need to set-up predetermined quality levels for the output you wait for. Every time the vendor returns you with the work, the quality mechanism must scan the work done.
If you have been able to do so much, all that you need to care is to ensure that your employees and organizational constituents accept the outsourcing arrangement finding the outsourcing decision as a contributory factor to increase their productivity. A business without trust is no business at all.
Do this over and over, you will find your-self more enriched with experience and more competent to tailor your requirements according to the objects of your work.
Don’t forget that you are a lawyer and remember to stuff in all the agreed commitments into your outsourcing contract.
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