Legal Process Outsourcing is the practice of procuring legal services from an external service provider. In recent times the market trend is suggesting a drop in pricing driven by consumers, which in turn is having a direct impact on the expenditures made by the organization with a particular focus on legal costs, which are considerably higher locally in the global market.
LPO comes to the rescue of the above situation, thereby driving the organization towards a cost and time-saving approach. High efficiency and skilled labor follow suit as major benefits of outsourcing. In today’s times, outsourcing legal services helps legal firms save on more than 60% of costs, which is being utilized to drive business growth and expansion.
With so much to offer, the LPO industry has witnessed an upward trend ever since. In 2016, the global legal process outsourcing market size was valued at 3 Billion USD, 5 Billion USD in 2018, 6.85 Billion USD in 2019, and 9 Billion USD in 2020, and is expected to reach a whopping 36 Billion USD by 2025.
The expected Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) from 2019 to 2025 is expected to be 31.5%.
A majority of legal process outsourcing is done by countries such as the U.S., Canada, and the UK from countries including India, China, Israel, the Philippines, South Africa, and Latin America. India is most popular for LPO among North American corporations.
So why is the LPO industry expected to see this boom in the first place?
In today’s times, the market is driven by the preference of enterprises to focus on their core businesses as they outsource the regular tasks to their onshore or offshore partners.
Adding to the above is the strategy to cut down costs considerably by hiring staff from outsourcing partners rather than hiring locally, the latter being a far more expensive option.
Growing urbanization limits real estate availability around the world, which in turn is impacting the real estate cost globally. To combat this situation, legal firms are cutting down on local staff strength to avoid investing in infra and instead are outsourcing their workforce needs to other countries.
The major tasks that are witnessing the outsourcing shift are as follows:
- Legal research & writing as part of the legal requirement for case filing and producing in court
- Patent drafting & filing for the patent process is a cumbersome task in terms of research and documentation
- E-discovery for organizations complying with regulatory, legal, and investigational requirements
- Client consultation and support
- Of the many countries which are racing for the spot of Favorite LPO destination for firms, India is way ahead of its counterparts in the race, primarily due to the below reasons:
- Skilled, qualified, expert legal professionals are available
- Indian workforce is fluent in English, which is the primary requirement for legal tasks involving legal research and writing
- Enhanced output due to high level of competency
- Improved relation of law firms with their clients due to quality work delivered
- Scalability benefit provided by Indian offshoring partners, which is not significant for any other geography
- Adding to this, favorable government initiatives associated with the LPO market such as Foreign Direct Investment in 100% equity of the firm in LPO enables foreign companies to establish their subsidiaries as private limited companies with minimum liability over investment.
- Indian offshoring partners have all requisites available in the form of confidentiality agreements and service level agreements, so data security and confidentiality, the only risk of outsourcing is put to rest
Primarily due to the above reasons, India’s offshore segment is expected to contribute approximately 12 Billion USD by 2025 with a CAGR of roughly 34% for the forecast period.
With more and more legal enterprises identifying the benefits of outsourcing, LPO is one such market that is expected to witness an upward trend only in the coming times as there is no looking back for this industry.
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