It’s 11:00 p.m.– Do You Know What Your Outsourced Services Are Doing?

Published December 11, 2007

In a recent column, law firm consultant John Tredennick made a most trenchant comment about legal service outsourcing: “All these (outsourced) services can be a boon to a firm of any size looking to perform more efficiently. But just because you can outsource a task doesn’t necessarily mean you should. The decision whether to outsource calls both strategy and ethics into play.”

Outsourcing is just another way to delegate work; appropriate delegation is another aspect of leverage; and leverage is what makes law firms more profitable. If you want to grow a practice, serve more people, or increase your personal wealth, you will need to understand and use the principles of delegation and leverage. In truth, almost every lawyer does this now—having a secretary to type, file, and do other office tasks is an elementary form of this concept.

However, managing the legal process and overseeing the quality of the work product of others is the reality of the legal profession. And this is outsourcing. In such circumstances, whether the “outsource” is someone in your office or someone in India or someone located in between, YOU, the lawyer, are still responsible for setting the strategy of the matter, the quality of the resulting work product, and the management of the entire process.

Outsourcing is not the practice of law. It’s the provision of high quality, low cost legal support products for licensed attorneys. Because the work is often delivered electronically and is always produced under the firm’s supervision, it is transparent to the client. That means clients rely upon their lawyer to ensure that a job is done right. In matters of governance, a lawyer’s responsibility for his or her own firm is magnified by the requirements of the profession’s rules of professional conduct. In my home state of California, for example, State Bar Rule 5.1 provides that partners and other lawyers with managerial authority in a law firm are personally responsible when other lawyers in the firm violate the Rules.

This is a heavy burden, and one no outsourcing lawyer should take lightly. When it comes to ensuring that client work is done correctly, the buck stops with you, the lawyer—no matter who has actually done the work.

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Audience type: Administrators, Associates, Large Law Firms, Small Law Firms, Sole Practitioners