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In its most basic terms, legal outsourcing is the practice of contracting work out or abroad for your law firm. Instead of completing every piece of work required for the business in-house, a law firm can choose to delegate certain tasks, whether it’s administrative duties, client management, or legal work, to outside agencies or companies.

Legal outsourcing — also called legal process outsourcing, legal services outsourcing, or legal staffing — encompasses a wide variety of different functions that can be outsourced by a law firm. Outsourced legal services include legal work that must be performed by lawyers, paralegals, and other legal experts but can be delegated to external law firms, freelance lawyers, or agencies. In addition, many law firms also choose to outsource non-legal business functions, such as client intake, customer service, billing, or marketing, that are required to keep a law firm working smoothly. 

Today, many different types of work fall under the umbrella of legal outsourcing. To distinguish between the various tasks, law firms also use a few additional phrases that are more specialized. Business process outsourcing (BPO), for example, refers to specifically outsourcing non-legal yet essential business functions. Legal offshoring, on the other hand, refers to outsourcing work — whether legal or non-legal — to be done in a different country, usually at a lower rate. 

Legal outsourcing is a common and growing practice today. Many law firms delegate duties ranging from answering calls to marketing their firm to external companies, with the goal to save attorneys time by allowing them to work more efficiently, thus increasing profits. After all, an attorney’s time is best spent on the legal work essential to the business, not on general business processes that can be accomplished by people without legal training.

For the purposes of this guide, we will focus specifically on legal BPO — the outsourcing of general business processes for law firms.

Legal outsourcing is a useful way to grow your law firm’s practice and profits while staying nimble as an organization. While outsourcing is often considered primarily a cost-saving measure, contracting out the non-core business functions of a law firm can yield a wide range of benefits, from preventing attorney burnout to improving the security of sensitive client information.

Here are the top 10 benefits of legal business process outsourcing and offshoring:

1. Lower labor costs

Hiring in-house employees can be an expensive proposition, especially in the legal industry. From the cost of salaries and benefits to the added expenses of recruiting, onboarding, and on-the-job training, bringing on a new internal hire often comes with a very high price tag.

Legal outsourcing, however, can lower costs dramatically — which is why elite law firms are choosing to delegate many functions to external teams. By letting external companies perform business processes for your law firm, your business can grow without adding more staff members, allowing you to better control your payroll and benefits costs.

Offshoring legal business processes can offer remarkable savings. By outsourcing non-core business functions to workers offshore, your law firm can access skilled labor at lower costs without compromising the quality of the work. In addition, many outsourcing and offshoring companies take care of the recruiting and onboarding process, allowing you to realize further savings on human resources-related expenses.

2. Lower overhead costs

4. Improved information security

Law firms often work with sensitive client information protected by local, state, and federal regulations. As a result, some states have even begun requiring lawyers to undergo cybersecurity and data protection training. Safeguarding legal information is a top priority for firms, yet due to the rise of remote work and distributed offices in recent years, that job has become more difficult. For example, a lawyer’s assistant who works from home — or a local cafe — may not have or practice the same level of digital security common within the confines of a legal office.

In contrast, the best legal outsourcing and offshoring companies ensure the safety of legal data by maintaining its offices in physically and digitally secure locations. Workers who perform their duties in these offices have their data protected through firewalls and other technologies necessary for a modern legal practice. In addition, employees should receive annual data security training.

5. Expanded service hours

In today’s always-on business environment, clients call and email law offices around the clock — and can get frustrated when they don’t get a quick response. Legal outsourcing and offshoring allows law firms to easily expand service hours by bringing on workers who live in different time zones or prefer nontraditional work hours. This allows firms to better serve clients without requiring in-house employees to work after hours or on weekends.

6. Higher customer satisfaction

Better customer service brings better business ratings, which is why many law firms choose legal outsourcing in order to improve the experience they provide to prospective and current clients. Outsourcing and offshoring generally allows law firms to improve their customer service, partly by allowing them to hire more customer service representatives due to lowered labor and overhead costs, and partly by enabling them to expand service hours. As a result, law firms are able to answer calls more quickly, respond to emails in a more timely fashion, and improve customer satisfaction overall.

7. Attorney time savings

Repetitive tasks such as client intake and management can easily be outsourced to outside consultants and companies. A case manager, for example, can follow up with clients on a regular basis to keep cases moving forward without taking up the lawyers’ time.

Outsourcing these tasks safeguards attorney time not only by protecting lawyers from performing rote tasks but also by providing lawyers with more robust, well-updated client files when it’s their time to step in. 

8. Attorney work-life balance

A 2021 survey found that 52% of attorneys felt burned out at their jobs. Since burnout is linked to lower employee performance and higher turnover rates, the wellbeing of lawyers is a critical issue for law firms to address. 

Legal outsourcing makes it easier for law firms to bring on and maintain fully staffed support teams to make the lives of lawyers easier. This can ease burnout by relieving lawyers of mundane, repetitive tasks, reducing unnecessary or unproductive overtime work, and allowing them more time to focus on work that makes a difference.

9. Organic, flexible growth

Sudden, sweeping changes happen often in the legal industry. One year, business can shoot up requiring a hiring frenzy; the next year, layoffs can ensue. Legal outsourcing makes it easier for law firms to scale up or down as business needs necessitate. Administrative teams can be quickly expanded, or new intake specialists be brought on quickly, allowing law firms to move much more nimbly than possible through in-house hires.

10. Lower turnover

Many in-house employees who are hired to perform back office operations or business processes often see their positions as temporary, entry-level jobs from which they’ll move on to more specialized careers or management roles. This tends to create a lot of churn in roles such as legal assistants, intake specialists, and case managers, putting law firms in a constant cycle of hiring and training new employees. 

Legal outsourcing, and offshoring in particular, makes it easier for law firms to tap skilled workers keen to stay long-term in the same role, due to a mix of cultural, vocational, financial, and lifestyle reasons. By lowering the turnover rate of staff, outsourcing can help retain valuable talent and preserve recruiting, onboarding, and training resources.

Many back office operations at law firms can be successfully outsourced to agencies or offshore companies. Some of the most commonly outsourced positions include:

– Case managers
– Intake specialists
– Customer service representatives
– Virtual assistants and receptionists
– Marketing specialists
– Human resources specialists
– Accounting and billing experts

To show how legal outsourcing works in practice, we’ll look more closely at three roles that are frequently outsourced by law firms:

Legal outsourcing for intake specialists

Law firms need to respond to a lot of phone calls, many from potential clients interested in representation. All these incoming inquiries need to be answered promptly and processed accurately to correctly assess whether the firm wants to take on the client and the case. 

Unfortunately for many law firms, hiring and retaining intake specialists is often an extremely time and labor intensive endeavor. Because the specialist position is considered an entry-level one in the U.S., employee churn tends to be high, leaving firms in the position of constantly recruiting and training new workers.

Legal outsourcing and offshoring are ready remedies for this challenge. By bringing on an external team of intake specialists with the help of an outsourcing partner, law firms are able to delegate this function altogether. The outsourcing partner handles all the recruiting and hiring of new intake specialists, who are trained to meet the unique needs of the law firm. If the work is offshored to workers in another country, the law firm is often able to significantly grow the size of their intake specialist team while holding down labor costs.

Legal outsourcing for case managers

Legal cases often take months to years to prepare and build, representing many hours of work for the law firm. Most of this work doesn’t require a lawyer and can instead be completed by case managers, because tasks consist of following up with the client, staying abreast of simple paperwork, and keeping good records. 

Hiring a case management team through legal outsourcing allows law firms to delegate this day-to-day work to skilled workers who have the time to build client relationships and keep detailed case files. This way, attorneys can simply step in when their expertise is needed and pick up the cases without missing a beat.

Legal outsourcing for virtual assistants and receptionists

A legal client’s first contact with a law firm is often through receptionists and assistants. Great legal receptionists and assistants not only perform the supportive functions at a law firm but also serve as representatives of the organization. 

Legal outsourcing allows law firms to hire skilled teams of receptionists and legal assistants who work remotely to fulfill many administrative needs. From making travel arrangements to setting up meetings to answering incoming calls, virtual legal assistants and receptionists can learn, adapt, and embody a law firm’s culture and business process to ensure administrative functions run smoothly. For law firms with extended or non-traditional office hours, offshore administrative teams can also offer flexible, around-the-clock support.

Every law firm is unique, which means each firm needs a unique outsourcing solution tailored to its needs. Here are the three big questions to ask and answer before partnering with a legal outsourcing company:

What are your firm’s needs? Begin by assessing your firm and its current needs. Where do the difficulties and pain points currently lie, especially in terms of staffing and workflow? Which teams are experiencing hiring delays or high turnover? What functions don’t have adequate coverage? Are the firm’s data management practices secure for all employees at all locations? What level of savings do you hope to realize through outsourcing?

What functions would benefit most from outsourcing? Determine which tasks or roles make sense to outsource or offshore. For example, if you have functions that are difficult or impossible to fill given the talent pool in your area, you might give those top priority for outsourcing. Consider also your data security needs, desired time zone coverage, and anticipated cost savings when making your decisions.

What partner can best meet your needs? Not all legal outsourcing companies are created equal, so partners must be selected with care. Make sure your partner offers outsourcing support for all the functions you’d like to delegate now and in the future. Check to ensure that the partner can provide a steady, reliable team, is flexible enough to work with you as business needs change, can meet your budgetary concerns, and has the capabilities to keep your data secure.

By considering these questions, your firm will be well-positioned to select a legal outsourcing partner that gives your legal team the full-spectrum support, flexibility, and cost savings you seek.

iFive cuts costs and boosts output for law firms by providing highly-skilled offshore administrative and back-office teams. 

Our experienced team members work from secure stations at our two Class A Service Delivery Centers in Quezon City, Philippines. We provide best-in-class support training and multiple layers of both virtual and physical security, including two manned security stations, biometric access systems, managed clean desk policies, and a robust data security program, to safeguard all legal, medical, and financial information.

Founded in 2018, iFive today employs more than 1,000 team members and serves some of the fastest-growing law firms in the United States. Our mission is to make offshoring accessible to legal teams seeking to simultaneously improve profitability and improve service delivery.