January 29, 2007
Legal Process Outsourcing is all about outsourcing legal assignments to India to tap on the huge potential of Indian legal services. Marking its foray into the untapped market of legal outsourcing, Hinduja TMT has entered in a joint venture with a UK based business consultancy firm Centric in association with a leading law firm Fox Mandal Little.
The JV shall be named Centric LPO and it aims at providing legal outsourcing services to MNC’s and international law firms. It would be a subsidiary of Hinduja TMT, aiming to capitalize on the legal process outsourcing, popularly known as LPO (after the BPO boom) to further its knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) capabilities.
According to Hinduja CEO, Partha Sarkar, the JV focuses on doing business worth $40 million over the next three years with healthy profit margins. The legal services to the JV shall be provided by Fox Mandal Little and directly address customer requirement for high-end legal services.
The reason for the LPO targeting India is the usage of English as the common language in the judicial circuit and resemblance with several global legal doctrines. The Indian legal system bears resemblance with the legal systems of UK and US to a great extent.
The services that are outsourced are writing abstracts, preparation of pleadings, research on litigation, drafting contracts, proofreading and the like. According to the industry sources, only about 3% capabilities have been tapped as yet in the legal outsourcing capabilities of India. As the real estate sector involves a lot of documentation, jobs like drafting contracts and agreements, litigation research, management of documentation, pre-litigation and litigation support, deposition summary and other paralegal services are being outsourced to India. But there is still a long way to go before realization of the full potential of Indian legal outsourcing of real estate transactional documentation.