Given the financial year end is often a time for divisions to finalise budgets it is also a key time to focus on the opportunity cost of time for in-house counsel and how legal process outsourcing (LPO) can enable internal teams to minimise the opportunity cost of time.

In-house counsel are a key part of an organisation’s risk and governance framework. In a post Royal Commission environment there will be more pressure on In-House counsels to proactively shape the governance discourse within organisations.

This will inevitably mean an increase on resourcing pressures for in-house legal departments dealing with the myriad of greater complexity in governance matters alongside the day to day transaction related processes.

In this scenario, having the ability to outsource process driven legal work and administration tasks can be a key pressure reliever for in-house legal teams.

At SBA we have seen many examples of how LPO has helped relieve the pressure within internal legal departments, allowing the team to focus on core legal work such as governance and risk related matters for the board and management team.

One of the ways that the in-house legal teams often overlook LPO is for more routine admin tasks. Do you think it is an effective use of resources to have a senior counsel format a client document for endless hours? What about dictating and transcribing file notes? In this blog we explore how legal process outsourcing can complement in-house legal teams.

Report Formatting

How long have you sat at the screen, staring at the screen trying to get one paragraph to match with another or avoiding having an image blow up the whole formatting of the document? Next time you or one of your in-house counsel sit down to edit an important document, make note of how much time is spent simply editing the formatting.

Even for a person who is highly skilled in MS Word formatting, a full report may take hours to polish. LPO allows in house counsel to access a wide pool of talent, ready to assist them at a moment’s notice.

SBA’s formatting team has experience formatting word documents for an array of legal matters across all legal disciplines. While the cost savings are an obvious reason for outsourcing these tasks, the opportunity cost of time is the far greater rationale. Would it be better to spend an hour formatting a document or considering a key risk framework issue?

Document Conversion

At SBA we have seen examples of internal legal teams who were having their senior lawyers manually type out any documents that required conversion to a digital form. Alongside this staff were not given the right tools or instructions to successfully convert this document to a PDF. Does this sound like a sensible use of resources for an internal legal team? When every dollar counts this can be a huge drain on a department?

SBA have a team of dedicated onshore & offshore copy typists who have a proven record of accomplishment of turning these documents around in an efficient matter. If nothing else, SBA can work with your office administrators to help establish a process flow to help the in-house team work more efficiently.

Dictations & Word Processing

Recording & dictation is a vital activity for any lawyer, in most traditional firms dedicated secretarial staff will complete these dictations for their team. For most in house counsel, the burden falls on themselves or a smaller number of admin staff shared across staff.

Outsourcing this dictation to an LPO can take great stress away from both your in-house counsel and overworked admin staff. SBA currently works with businesses to help setup a dictation pipeline for their in-house counsel.

We can also work within your existing dictation software to complete work in an efficient manner, depending on the workload we can generally return your documents the next day.

SBA aims to become a strategic partner with your business, using our expertise to help grow and improve the efficiency of your business. SBA’s administration & secretarial support team in Australia and India are currently providing customised administration support services to law firms, accounting firms and general businesses in various industry sectors.

Alongside this the secretarial support team provides WP & transcriptions using softwares ranging from Olympus, Phillips, Bighand, Winscribe & more.

Get in touch with SBA today to discuss how LPO could be implemented in your legal department.