Legal Support Services – The Ladder to Success for Lawyers and Law Firms

Most of the lawyers usually remain occupied with the goal of becoming successful, but due to the shortage of time, they often face difficulties in achieving their goals. Lawyers find it hard to cope with the rise in litigation cases, and they usually don’t have enough time to fulfill the requirements of all the clients solely; this is one of the barriers to their success.

If they get free from the core legal activities, then they can make strategies for their success and work on them. Thus, for lawyers and law firms, the real path to business expansion, growth, and profitability lies in outsourcing legal support services. Today, the LPO industry is almost as big in size and turnover as the legal industry.

 If lawyers want to reach their objective of exponential growth in the industry, they might want to opt for outsourcing legal back-office functions as they are the ladder to success. To make their business more successful, they can outsource the below-mentioned tasks to reliable outsourcing partners and make themselves free from the core activities.

Legal Research:

Legal research, though sounds simple, is not an easy job. It is the backbone of each and every case because, without any research, lawyers are not able to start proceedings of their cases. This is a more time-consuming task than others. There are lots of problems lawyers face while doing research such as

i) Legal process interpretation, which means a wrong interpretation can result in research not relevant to the case.

ii) The most crucial stage of legal research is the beginning of a case because all the facts and doctrines of the case are explored carefully.

So, lawyers can outsource their research tasks to a reliable partner and start working on the strategies for the growth of their law firm.

Contract Management:

Most of the law firms have to deal with thousands of contracts, and lawyers have to go through all of them with a complete focus, they don't get time for anything else. Besides, the contract management life cycle contains seven stages, such as contract creation, contract review, contract approval, contract execution, etc. Reliable third-party partners have the expertise to carry out these functions effectively not only in the beginning but during the entire contract management life cycle. To increase your law firm profitability and for success, lawyers can even look for specialized outsourcing agencies that match their primary area of activities in law.

Document Summarization: 

This is another task that lawyers can outsource. This task is also labor-intensive and vital for every case. It includes the preparation of documents, deposition summaries, reviewing the document database with definitive points, and some specific issues.

Concluding all said above, outsourcing might be the best way for lawyers and law firms to provide higher value to their clients on time and become more prosperous within a limited period. Moreover, it is also beneficial to increase profitability.

7 ways to protect your business against a legal fallout.

When we start a business, various types of risks come between it, that is related to finance and legal terms. As an entrepreneur, you have to play a big role in the growth and success of your business. No matter what roles you end up serving like you are the sales person, the developer, project manager, and the customer representative. This is important to remember that being a small business owner, you have to keep a check on business work on your own and can never free yourself from the liability of law.

It is essential for a business owner that he should be aware of the legal issues that may come in your way. This is not required to hire a lawyer at the initial stage, but you have a little knowledge regarding business law so that you can protect your business from legal fallouts.

Here are seven ways to protect your business from any legal fallout:

1. Always Prefer Written Agreements: When we start working with another party or business, whether they are clients, business partners, employees or service providers, signing a written contract is essential. Written agreements include all the terms and conditions clearly. In this way, we’ll be able to settle all the disputes easily, because everything will be mentioned in the contracts. If you do not sign a contract with another party, then they can easily ditch or cheat you. So, always prefer a written agreement during an initial stage.

2. Keep Your Paperwork Streamlined: Once you are done with all of the contracts or agreements, then the next level is to file and assemble your papers carefully. It is highly essential for a business to have an automated system at a place that keeps your contracts and agreements updated, whenever amendments made in the policies. Outdated paperwork is useless for business and missing information can create a misconception.

If you face any legal challenges, then hire a professional that will help you to reduce your burden by auditing a business.

3. Watch What You Say: Firstly, avoid making any public announcements and statement with your staff and client that that might be considered questionable. Always be polite with your staff and customer that is in your relation.

4. Read All Available Business Law: You may not be a lawyer by your profession, but the little knowledge about legal terms is better for you. It can help you to protect your business from legal mistakes.

Here is some necessary information that every small business should know:

• Registering Intellectual property, copyrights, and trademarks
• Financial Law
• Employment and Labor Law
• Marketing and Advertising Law

5. Remember to Register Your Intellectual Property: Intellectual property includes ideas and inventions that were created by you for your business. For example, if you have an e-commerce business that exists online then don’t forget to register your IP. Your competitors can copy your content and trademarks for which you invested huge amount. So, you need to protect your business identities like design, logo, and ideas, which is possible through intellectual property registration.

6. Get the Right Insurance: The best way to protect your business from legal fallout is to get the right insurance. As a business owner, this means looking for public liability, crime insurance, and worker’s compensation. Liability insurance can help pay for financial damages resulting from a lawsuit. Legal damages can be quite high, so this kind of insurance can protect your business finances and assets in case of an accident.

7. Seek Professional Legal Advice, When You Need it: If you are unable to understand the specific terms and conditions in any contract, seeking the help of lawyers immediately before signing the documents is an ideal way. A lawyer can help you to understand thoroughly all the terms and conditions of the contract. But, hire a lawyer is a costly process, so you have to opt for legal support services. They have a team of professionals that help in contract review and management process and enable you to make the right decision at an affordable cost.

These are some simple ways that will help you with the legal conflicts and protect your business.

Technology Trends that Affects the Legal Profession

Technology has become a growing trend in every business industry and legal is not an exception in this regards. There is no doubt that technology will constantly impact the legal profession in the coming years too. 

Here are the technology trends that will help lawyers and legal professionals to maintain better accuracy, efficiency, and overall performance in their day-to-day activities:

Artificial Intelligence: 

There is a lot of pressure on lawyers and law firms to exceed client’s expectation. Lawyers are still stuck in cumbersome, paper-based processes that are inefficient and costly. The challenge lawyers are facing is not only high competition but also to reduce their operating expenses.

With the help of this artificial intelligence, they can manage their whole work without any assistance. A recent study by McKinsey & Co estimates that 23% of lawyer time is automatable.

                                         

These AI tools work well in the unsupervised situation, where the software operates without human interaction. Systems look for patterns, relationships, and connections in unstructured data. For example, you just need to put your raw data into the system and those systems will give exact relevant information back to you with a proper summary.

Virtual Law Firms: 

In the coming years, we will also witness online legal services that have wider scope and greater flexibility how and where legal professionals work. It will change the landscape of the legal industry completely.

From virtual meetings to virtual legal assistance- everything will become seamless with the help of cloud capabilities. And it will offer a greater work and life balance for legal professionals overall.

Performance Measurements: 

More than 50% of top global law firms today are using some form of business intelligence to enhance performance management, and surprisingly this number will hit 75% or higher in the coming years.

Electronic Discovery: 

A few machine learning tools will help in the e-discovery process. With the massive arrival of digital data like emails, texts, voicemails, electronic calendars, etc., it has now open gate for analysis in legal proceedings, and lawyers need help to process all of that information quickly.

In other words, we can say that AI and deep learning will go a long way to make legal processes less cumbersome, and this will be a growing niche in the year 2019.

Cloud and Mobile: 

Imagine you are in court fighting over a stressful legal issue when your lawyer suddenly remembers: he left your files on his desk – back at the office. What do you do that time? These are the issues that mobile and cloud services help to eliminate.

Indeed, the fastest growing sectors in the legal market are legal process outsourcers and managed legal service providers employing both efficient processes and technology to capture work from traditional legal service providers.

Reasons Behind Why Businesses Need Contract Management Solutions

Contracts are an essential part for small, medium and large-sized enterprises and it matters a lot for every business. Small businesses can survive without having systems in place to manage contracts, but medium/large sized enterprises cannot survive without any appropriate contract management system.

Why every business needs contract management services/solutions for their business?

Some of the reasons for Contract Management Solutions are:

Management is Reliable than the Memory

Being a business owner, it is not an easy task to keep dozens of business contracts in your mind, because you don’t depend on your memory to recall key details of agreements. So to get rid of these kinds of things you need a proper contract management solution.

Ease of Contract Accessing

Small business owners can develop centralized digital storage for easy contract access. In this way, an entrepreneur will find the process of handling contracts much more efficient. But this solution is beneficial for small businesses because in medium/large companies’ multiple employees are involved in any given agreement.

Future Enhancement with Contract Strategy

Let’s say business owner pull up their financial reports and notices that last year they made 25% more profit than this month. I am sure that there are systems in place for how you go about this.

But if you decide that you need a creative approach, maybe you and your team have decided that you want to offer a creative sale deal. These kinds of individual contracts should be there in your future strategy.

To Keep Track of the Company’s Contract

Most of the business owners use email platform for communication with other party and exchange all the contracts information over there. Sometimes due to a busy schedule, they cannot reply to email or due to too many email exchange they might lose some information. So this is not a good option. But a proper contract management system allows you to track every contract changes, amendments, review notes, and comments.

Saving Minutes’ v/s Hours

When you manage all the contract management process manually, then you are wasting a huge amount of time on that. If you are taking help of any third party service provider, then you can save a considerable amount of time, i.e., you can do hour work in minutes.

It’s all up to entrepreneurs if they go for contract management services or system. But a company can get the benefit like efficiency improvements if they have a proper contract management solution to handle and manage their contracts. As a result, the company will able to increase profit by generating more sales quickly.

Why Consider Legal Process Outsourcing for your Law Firm?

Today, many organizations are seeking effective ways to reduce their operating cost and focus more on core functions. And legal process outsourcing (LPO) is gaining popularity in this regards.

LPO is a basically a process where lawyer transfers their non-core tasks to external firms that have professional lawyers, paralegals, etc., that too at cost-effective prices. Recently a report cited by Novitex and ALA (Association of Legal Administrators) stated that 55% of law firms in the US entrust part of all their legal functions including document processing, litigation support, patent applications, contract drafting, brief writing, and e-discovery.

Why is Litigation Support Outsourcing Beneficial for Law Firms?

In the legal world, most of the law firms and lawyers across the globe are looking for the ways to reduce their costs for litigation process. Outsourcing litigation support services are helping legal attorneys, law firms, and in-house counsel to lighten their workload.

The main purpose of litigation support services is to streamline the complex litigation tasks for every law firm and lawyers. Many law firm’s owners and legal attorneys are now opting for a reliable litigation support provider for improving their revenues and effectively handling their complicated litigation process by identifying their legal issues and managing them accordingly.

Litigation Support Outsourcing Companies

Reasons to Outsource Your Firm’s Litigation Support Needs

As the competition rises in the legal industry, law firms and attorneys have been opting to outsource their litigation support tasks so as to save time for their core legal task and streamline their office operations. There are several reasons to outsource litigation support needs; some of them are listed as follows:

Litigation Support Services

Save Costs- Due to rising in competition legal firm constantly struggle to cut their expenses. A viable option is to outsource the litigation support requirements as in-house employees could actually cost more.

Time- the outsourcing firms often work 24/7 regardless of the time zones, delivering faster results than your in-house team. The team of outsourcing firm consists of experts who make sure that all deadlines are met with high accuracy and results are delivered timely.

Reduced Liability- Errors in legal process can lead to devastating, increasing the liability of the legal firm and ultimately resulting in low profits. Hiring litigation support companies can resolve this issue efficiently. As the outsourcing firms specialize in providing effective services that lead to minimized liability for your firm by ensuring all the operations that are performed are in accordance with the law.

These were some of the reasons that underpin the need to outsource the litigation support for your firm. To know more about litigation support services you can visit: http://www.legalsupportworld.com/