Case Study: Conquering Legal Process Outsourcing Disparity with Smart Process Apps

Legal Process Outsourcing – like other forms of outsourcing – can be an extremely complex process for a Fortune® 500 corporate legal department. It may work with LPO services around the globe including Argentina, Australia, France, the Philippines and South Korea.  Outsourced work can include anything from records management, patent applications, research, motions or briefs, eDiscovery and compliance assistance.  When LPO is successful, law departments realize cost savings, higher levels of service, dedicated expertise and the ability for in-house counsel to spend more time with clients and priority matters.  

One such company, one of the world’s largest business services firms for sales and marketing, works with 500-plus companies worldwide and across multiple industries. The law department discovered in 2012 that its supply of internal legal resources would be unable to satisfy the ever-increasing demand from internal client teams for legal support. Significantly increasing internal headcount was not in the budget, so the company began a project to change the way it allocated work and introduce new tools to manage legal work – all with an end-game goal of increasing efficiency, performance and cost savings.

The company realized that it needed the right technology to properly source and track the hundreds of LPO RFPs it generated to outsource projects. In the past, the company had used spreadsheets to track vital information. However, a project of this size could not be adequately supported this way.  It turned instead to Smart Process Apps.

With Smart Process Apps, the corporate legal department could track and report on legal matters, allow different members of the legal team to be assigned to work on matters, share electronic files and facilitate communication between onshore and offshore teams.  It automated workflows of the RFPs and matter work, improved the integration of client and legal teams around the world and enabled internal clients to have visibility into the status of agreements they submitted for review. 

The Smart Process Apps’ tracking and workflow tools allowed any user to submit work to the legal team and route the work to the correct team member. The tools enabled all users to have a dashboard of work, easily generate reports on their work and quickly ascertain an overview of the legal process overall. The Smart Process Apps also developed a contract repository that links to the workflow tool to easily manage the renewal process.

With Smart Process Apps, the company was able to:

• Establish more predictable and managed outside legal costs.
• Reduce overall costs to deliver legal services that allowed for increased resources to address the growth in volume.
• Create a more predictable turnaround time that has decreased in time.   
• Focus on utilizing resources more effectively and transparently with internal clients.
• Create repeatable processes that can be supervised by an attorney but implemented by an outside service provider.
• Install a focus on increasing the efficiency and transparency of our work processes. 

The end result? The LPO initiative – supported by Smart Process Apps – led the company to increase predictability in overall outside legal costs, create a faster turnaround of work and better communicate within the company about expectations for the cost and timing of legal work.