Ediscovery@retail

Corporates battling out in court and large money chasing few law-firms is no surprise.
But an anorexic patient requiring to pull out all emails, chats, net 2.0 profiles and then producing them to the opposite counsel for an insurance claim dispute does raise some eyebrows. With amount of speciously important data (chats, phone conversations, profiles, emails, scanned OCRed notes, hard-drive documents, online documents etc etc) every dispute is going to take longer than ever. Simple landlord-tenant disputes can take upto three years with legal costs over-running all over. A divorse case with slight bitterness can have couples running to view and review all chat messages and social networking pings fo each other and people in their circle. In the past post ediscovery 5% of cases went to trial and now only 2% do. The cost of ediscovery has become the most important reason for out-of-court settlement.

Ediscovery @ $4.3/GB

Wow.. Kazeon and Attenex have collaborated to provide ediscovery services to corporates. Kazeon claims document processing efficiency so huge that it processing cost comes to $4.3/GB where as current ediscovery vendors charge anywhere between 1700 to 2200$ per GB. Even if we count for any filtering, this is still dirt cheap, so much so that it looks like a printing error in the press release.

But Kazeon's alliance looks like a decisive step towards installed application model of business from the currently prevalent data hosting model in the ediscovery domain. It might also open up the corporate investigation market, which because of the high price point of ediscovery services was out of the reach for the ediscovery vendors.

LPO in India

LPO in India started as with outsourcing of transcription. But now LPO in India has grown to knowledge intensive work. Today all major functions including patent application drafting, legal research, pre-litigation documentation, advising clients, analyzing drafted documents, writing software licensing agreements to drafting distribution agreement are being outsourced to India. The patent filing and the due diligence work has grown with such a pace that most of the LPOs now have a separate department for patent related work.

Potential Legal services outsourcing market of US is about 3-4 billion dollars. It comprises of paralegal and research support, contract drafting and revising and contract management, library services, patent and trademark prosecution and litigation support. India will grow it's current share of 3-4 per cent of the 250 billion dollar global market of Legal Process Outsourcing to 7-8 percent by 2010. A recent value notes report said the LPO revenues of India are set to grow up to 4.5 billion dollars by 2010. As of now less than 10,000 people are employed in the LPO industry. By 2015 we could see this number swell to 80,000.

Wipro Gets onto LPO Bandwagon

Wipro's LPO initiative is at least an year old, though the company has decided to generate sound bytes on this only recently.

Not the first of the block, Wipro probably still has not realised the full potential of LPO business yet. However, considering how quickly Wipro took leadership in the BPO business (inorganically and otherwise)we can never discount this company.

Your Lawyer's Office--thousands Of Miles Away

Interesting Article

Advantages of LPO to India mentioned:

1: Same common-law and business principles as British, Canadian and U.S. lawyers
2: Large number of qualified engineers and lawyers
3: Technology
4: Cost! Cost!! Cost!!

India LPOs mentioned (in the order of being quoted):

1: MindCrest
2: Quislex
3: Pangea3
4: Integreon
5: Evalueserve

Triton moving into LPO

Triton, a Delhi based Call Center firm, is another one smitten by Legal outsourcing charm.

Triton had consolidated its business by merging three companies, Saffron Global, Sai Info and Webrizon India into Triton. It primarily operates its business from Saffron, the 850-seater call centre that it acquired in 2005.

Integreon keen to bulk up in LPO

US-based outsourcing firm Integreon, which has a presence in India, is on the lookout for acquisitions here.

Investment banking sources said the company is in talks with domestic knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) and business process outsourcing (BPO) firms and at least two small buyouts for a total of $50 million are likely to be sealed during the current calendar year.

It also acquired a part of the LPO business of New York-based BPO major Bowne, which provides financial publishing that year. In April 2003,