The legal industry is expanding, and now more than ever, sustaining growth requires external support. In this article, National Legal Staffing Support (NLSS) explains how legal staffing is stepping in to fill a vital role in the growing legal industry.
Overview of the market
According to Verified Market Research, the global legal process outsourcing (LPO) market is estimated to be nearly $7 billion and will grow to over $80 billion by 2027. This phenomenal growth rate is attributed to the tendency law firms show for trimming overhead and focusing on their core strengths.
Enterprises of all types and in all industries have identified significant economic advantages achieved by outsourcing non-core tasks. This shift from a generalist mentality to a lean specialist model introduces enormous efficiencies.
Within the legal community, the detail-heavy and time-consuming aspects of legal legwork are often best handled by firms specializing in these matters, especially for growing law firms. The community’s appetite in this direction enables the desired overhead trimming and is responsible for the LPO market’s remarkable growth.
E-discovery
Electronic discovery, or e-discovery—digitally identifying, collecting, and producing electronically stored information (ESI) requested in a lawsuit or investigation—is necessary for many organizations to comply with regulatory, legal, and investigational requirements efficiently.
Large volumes of information, including emails, documents, databases, presentations, audio and video files, voicemail, social media feeds, and websites, must be examined for potentially relevant data. The information, including metadata, is collected, extracted, indexed, and secured in a database.
The e-discovery segment of global legal process outsourcing alone is estimated to be valued at over $10 billion in the next few years. It is one of the most important markets for legal staffing services. Both fully staffed and understaffed legal firms leverage outsourcing for e-discovery tasks.
How the LPO meets demand
For many corporate legal departments, the legal process outsourcing model provides an innovative new paradigm. LPO represents a shift in legal task assignments that results in a more efficiently run department with overall cost savings.
In the traditional legal department model, outside counsel is used for many legal tasks, including some that require only moderate specialized legal knowledge and experience. Everything else is kept for in-house legal resources to handle. LPO adds another lower level to the traditional hierarchy.
In the LPO model, this new, less expensive layer frees up resources and costs that allow the in-house counsel to shift upwards in the pyramid by taking on more of what the outside counsel was assigned in the traditional model. The outside counsel—the most expensive layer of the model—needs only focus on the law’s highly specialized areas.
This “shift up” paradigm moves some responsibilities from the top of the hierarchy to the in-house resources which have been unshackled from repeatable legal tasks requiring relatively little specialized knowledge and experience.
Conclusion
As a new and innovative solution driven by fierce competition, legal staffing will become ever more important. LPO provides the antidote for the inefficiencies of the in-house generalist model by adding a foundational layer of cost-effective support to the traditional legal hierarchy.
About National Legal Staffing Support
National Legal Staffing Support is a pioneer and leading provider of legal process outsourcing. Located in Boca Raton, Florida, the company offers front- and back-office support to experienced consumer protection attorneys specializing in debt resolution. National Legal Staffing Support offers paralegal services, document management solutions, pre-litigation support, pre-filing analysis, research, and client communication management.
