Legal Process Outsourcing and the need to return to the future

Over the past few months, I have witnessed and continued to observe many articles generated in specialized media in the United States, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, Germany, Belgium and other developed countries regarding the incremental trend of actors in the world of legal services who have with concern directed their views towards alternative legal service providers who have been able to innovate in business models and / or in value and product proposals, conquering relevant market shares.

As part of this current and in a place in the world relatively far from these global trends, the permanent connection with the leaders of those organizations that begin to take a leading role has allowed me to take a privileged and informed position on the influence that these actors begin to have on industry.

The reality of the national and Latin American market in terms of legal innovation is clear, few have been convinced that there are ways to do different things and to engage in the development of sustainable business models that allow us to exploit opportunities that the market presents in a heading marked by resistance to change and an almost romantic charm with the status quo.

However, the challenges are multiple and the needs to be met varied. A particular need for my development is the Legal Process Outsourcing service ("LPO"), a service characterized by allowing companies, legal departments and even legal studies to have specialized teams focused on the use of process tools and project management to address recurrent and voluminous issues that usually turn off the internal teams of each organization.

The LPO is probably one of the solutions that I would have most liked to have when I developed legal manager functions in essentially dynamic organizations and where the resource restriction, on the one hand and the speed required by internal customers with regard to the execution of the work, on the other, was one of the most common dilemmas to be resolved.

The LPO seeks to generate simple solutions to complex problems, where efficiency, knowledge in process design and its implementation and the incorporation of technological products aimed at the automation of functions are now a real need and with regional scalability potential.

The retail, mining, energy, banks and financial institutions and other related industries are the main candidates for such solutions in the short term. In fact, they are all industries that have been affected by cost restrictions, the need to optimize processes without sacrificing quality and where technological integration is incipient. It is enough to note how competition in the financial industry has focused on the application of mechanisms and processes that allow contracts to be contracted and monitored through platforms, reducing information asymmetry and turning all efforts to deliver better consumer experiences to customers.

In the same vein and following the 2008 crisis, much of the world's major financial institutions were forced to generate tools and to find service providers to enable them to negotiate, control and adjust their high volume of contracts, with differentiated methodologies, use of visualization and warning technologies at reasonable costs. In this area, traditional legal studies, given the inefficiencies and limitations inherent in their model, are not able to structure the work teams or implement the right solutions to meet this demand. So it is precisely where companies specially designed for these functions, with quality equipment, multidisciplinary knowledge and special affinity to the use of technological products, have an unparalleled advantage.

Migration from the world of speciality to the world of experience, as has been the result of the increased internalization of activities by legal departments, was, at the time, a challenge.

After more than 15 years of a process in which the rise in internal legal functions within each organization has been observed, it seems wise to consider that these areas require more and more differentiated value proposals, where the challenge is no longer the internalization of work, but the migration from that world of the experience that these organizations have accumulated inhouse to the world of efficiency, outsourcing services effectively and without having to resort to traditional legal studies.

We have a great opportunity and it will be time to give the right to those we have undertaken in this type of activity.

Andrés Jara B.
CEO Alster Legal
ajara @ 18.209.34.37