Watch out--the outsourcing bug has bit the financial industry, namely the behemoths of the likes of JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley. Not only are back office functions being outsourced to India, but more and more, high-end analytical research and overseeing foreign-exchange trades and complicated credit derivatives contracts.
The outsourcing wave hits investment bankers
It's not just IT support anymore. Banks increasingly are taking their research analysis operations abroad -- and deal-making may be next.
By Shaheen Pasha, CNNMoney.com staff writer
February 22, 2006: 9:45 AM EST
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) - First came IT outsourcing. Now comes investment banking.
After years of outsourcing technology support and other back-office operations to countries like India and China, financial institutions are increasingly looking to move large portions of their investment banking operations abroad, according to a recent report by Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu.
Faced with a dearth of skilled workers and shrinking profit margins, banks that want to remain competitive in the global marketplace can't afford to miss out on high-quality -- and cheaper -- foreign talent, the report said.
As a result, what began as technology support is now morphing into more analytic operations.
"Most of the large financial institutions were in the IT side of outsourcing but as they leveraged that experience, they got more interested" in moving more of their investment banking and research activities abroad, said Niket Patankar, chief executive of outsourcing firm Adventity Inc.
Among the leaders in outsourcing and offshoring are the big investment banks: Citigroup (Research), Morgan Stanley (Research), Lehman Brothers (Research) and JPMorgan Chase (Research). Typically, those banks have moved their research analysis operations offshore in order to take advantage of the time difference between the U.S. and Asia as well as the cheaper labor.
"Investment banking has a lot of number crunching that to a large degree can be done anywhere," said Alenka Grealish, manager of the banking group at Celent LLC. "By taking press releases and data feeds and digesting them offshore, the components can be made into basic analyst reports" that are available to clients early in the morning.
Going one step further JPMorgan Chase, however, is taking its investment banking activities abroad a step further. The company was one of the first investment banks to not only transfer the company's back-office and call-center operations but to also hire research analysts in India, Hong Kong and Singapore to complement its U.S.-based research team. After piloting the program in 2003 with about 1,200 employees in India, the company announced late last year that it plans to have a total of 9,000 employees in India by the end of 2007, with one-third of those employees working for the company's investment banking unit. Not only will the Indian workers handle research and analysis for the bank but will also be responsible for its foreign exchange trades and its highly complicated credit derivatives contracts.
Some experts expect that as banks become more comfortable with their offshore operations and foreign talent becomes more attuned to the companies' way of doing business, financial institutions may even shift some deal-making responsibility onto its foreign employees.
The Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu report indicated that offshore operations give financial services companies a foothold in new and emerging markets such as China, where there are more revenue opportunites than mature markets like the U.S. The report also predicts that driven by the need to take aggressive cost-cutting measures, the financial services industry will move 20 percent of its total costs base offshore by the end of 2010, compared to the current average of 3.5 percent.
Although no numbers are yet available, Peter Lowes, principle and head of outsourcing advisory services at Deloitte Consulting LLP, said in a few years, banks may increasingly rely on offshore talent to conduct due diligence and to screen prospective clients for investment banking business.
And while there is no single, authoritative source on the specific number of U.S. investment banking jobs that could be lost to offshoring, Forrester Research predicts that within 10 years, at least 3.3 million U.S. jobs across industries will be shipped to lower-cost and developing countries such India, China and the Phillipines.
A competitive necessity
"I believe the industry has reached such a level of globalization that it matters less and less where the actual (research) is generated and matters more what the cost of generating those products are" said Richard Bove, analyst at Punk Ziegel & Co. "Banks can't afford not to do (outsourcing) anymore."
It takes about three years for banks to see full benefits from an offshoring program, said Deloitte's Lowes, as companies overcome the initial learning curve of doing business abroad and gradually build their scale. Firms that aggressively expand their scope and scale will deliver much higher returns on the foreign investments than those that simply dabble in the practice, he said. Top performers can see cost savings of up to 60 percent while bottom performers report savings of less than 20 percent, Lowes said.
Lowes added that those companies that reinvest some of their cost savings towards continuing to expand their operations offshore are going to be the true long-term winners.
"The economics (of offshoring in banking) are strong and the risks are being successfully mitigated" he said. "Today it's a competitive necessity."
Wednesday, February 22, 2006
Wednesday, February 15, 2006
Litigation Budgeting Helps In-House Counsel Control Costs
Having spoken to a number of general counsel over the past few months, its easily apparrent that litigation costs are among the top concerns of in-house counsel. Not only the sheer cost of litigation, but also the unpredictability of costs is unsettling at best for general counsel. We did speak to a few general counsel who have actively kept their outside counsel on a budget. One in-house lawyer, a director of litigation for a Fortune 100 company, explained that he bid out legal work to law firms, and awarded the work to the firm with the best value. Moreover, he kept his outside counsel on budget.
This practice of budgeting litigation is certainly the way to go for general counsel. While you may never be comfortable with the high cost of litigation, with legal budgeting, you need not lose sleep over the final bill.
Litigation Budgeting: No Crystal Ball RequiredDavid J. LevyThe Corporate CounselorFebruary 15, 2006
Litigation may be simply one of the costs of doing business, but it's no secret that the difficulty in predicting those costs adds to the frustration in corporate legal departments. Concerns about costs and how to control or predict them weave their way throughout a survey of corporate litigation trends commissioned for the second consecutive year by Fulbright & Jaworski, and conducted by an independent research firm. (The 2005 survey was comprised of written responses from 354 in-house attorneys, including 50 in the United Kingdom. Most of the respondents held the title of General Counsel, Legal Director or a similar senior-level position in their respective legal departments.) This article discusses one of the most effective, yet surprisingly underutilized tools for managing litigation costs: the litigation budget from outside counsel.
A RECURRENT THEME: COSTS, COSTS, COSTS
Even when not directly addressed in the survey questions, the survey participants often injected the subject of litigation costs into their answers. For example, when asked for specific examples of their top litigation concerns, nearly one in five mentioned the costs of litigation as one of their top concerns rather than any specific type of litigation. In fact, costs were among the top two concerns mentioned across all eight industries that were represented in the survey. And litigation costs ate up the biggest chunk of the total corporate legal budget in the manufacturing, energy and insurance industries.
It is not surprising, then, that "cost efficiency" was ranked second only to "results" among the criteria used in measuring the success of legal departments, as well as that of individual attorneys in the department. Survey participants also expected more litigation and rising costs in the future. Participants, therefore, want future surveys to continue to inquire about ways that corporate legal departments are trying to manage and reduce litigation costs.
In fact, when asked for the one message they would like to deliver to their outside counsel, the most frequent answer involved "controlling costs." The verbatim answers ranged from the metaphorical ("Sharpen your pencil"), to the direct ("Cut your fees"), to the diplomatic ("Be very careful in your billing practices and keep legal fees as reasonable as possible"). Others emphasized the need to be updated regularly on costs ("Keep me informed of your day-to-day activities so that I am better able to estimate costs" and "Communicate with us, let us know how we are doing"). And when asked what one phrase they most hate hearing from their law firm, the answer often centered on cost surprises ("Sorry, we have gone over budget," "It cost more than we expected") and uncertainty ("Can't estimate the costs").
However phrased, the answer across industries, geographic regions and size of companies was clear: Litigation costs -- and especially the unpleasant surprises from them are an ongoing source of tension between clients and outside counsel.
E-DISCOVERY COSTS AND LIABILITIES
Adding to the dilemma of cost control is the fact that a growing component of litigation costs — and one that needs careful consideration in budgeting -- is electronic discovery. To be sure, the initial estimates from outside firms for document collection and management process may often sound reasonable (e.g., $2000 per gigabyte, or $200 per hour). But in a complex matter, that bill may quickly soar to six figures, or even seven, especially after adding per-page charges for putting documents into a database, converting them to appropriate file formats, producing them and other related charges. Indeed, in large cases, seven-figure e-discovery costs are not uncommon -- especially if the costs are not properly managed.
Thus, particularly in class actions, multi-district litigations, patent litigation cases and other complicated, document-intensive cases, clients need to closely examine their outside law firms' capabilities and experience in creating and managing the electronic discovery process. This includes the ability to most efficiently and effectively use document repositories and otherwise handle document production. If they do not have sufficient experience, they may not achieve the cost control or predictability that clients want.
Companies can also have a hand in reducing their e-discovery costs. Those corporations that have established an internal procedure for locating, organizing and producing documents without the need for outside help can save substantial amounts of money. This may be beyond the bandwidth of smaller legal departments, but it can be an important cost saver for companies with the legal infrastructure to do it.
However, even small companies can save money by taking a proactive approach in their normal business operations with written record retention policies and litigation hold policies designed for today's electronic data world. Hanging over the process of e-discovery, of course, is the threat of spoliation (intentional destruction of, or failure to preserve, evidence for pending or reasonably foreseeable litigation). Spoliation can have a major impact on the outcome of a case, since one of the possible sanctions is an instruction from the judge to infer that the "destroyed" documents in question would have been adverse to the party's case. Other sanctions, ranging from monetary fines to striking of all pleadings can also have disastrous consequences and cause a case to turn on how it was handled, as opposed to the underlying facts and laws.
The cost of not being well prepared at all times for litigation in the management of information has been demonstrated in several high-profile cases in recent years. The notorious labor/employment case, Zubulake v. UBS Warburg LLC, resulted in a $28 million jury award and a series of rulings by the judge outlining more clearly the duty-to-preserve responsibilities and actions that both in-house and outside counsel should take to meet them. Last year's finding of document/data destruction in Coleman v. Morgan Stanley was part of the reason for the approximately $1.5 billion damages award. In both cases, and others, the failure or inability of companies to produce all of the documents subpoenaed in a timely manner contributed significantly to the negative outcome of the case.
The good news is that the survey findings showed that companies are getting the message. Three-quarters of the companies in the survey had litigation hold policies in place, and 45 percent of those had revised their policies in the past year. The same was true with written records retention policies where 82 percent of the total sample had policies and 62 percent of those companies had revised their policies in the past year. The high level of revisions probably indicates an appreciation that electronic discovery is a rapidly changing area of the law and requires close monitoring.
Litigation hold policies, however, do not help to control costs. Indeed, the Catch-22 is that the preservation of vast amounts of data for litigation is more likely to increase not only the litigation costs, but also their unpredictability.
BUDGETING: SOLUTION, NOT PROBLEM
Despite the obvious cost concerns, the Litigation Trends Survey showed that efforts to predict and manage litigation costs are sketchy, at best, in the corporate world. Surprisingly, just 37 percent of the companies in the survey require a budget from their outside law firms for all their litigation matters; and only another 11 percent require budgets more than half of the time. (Tracking time-to-resolution for litigation matters is another practice that is apparently far from universal. Although 22 percent of the sample said they always track time-to-resolution, more than half never do it.)
It is certainly true that unforeseen events occur over the course of a matter, and no one has perfect vision when looking out 12 to 24 months, or more, into the future. Still, experienced litigators -- and in-house attorneys -- can draw on their collective experiences in projecting what tasks will need to be performed and estimating how many attorney hours will be required for each task, what the expenses for each task will be, and how long each "phase" of the case will last — if only they would take the time to really focus on it. Working together, outside and in-house counsel can therefore formulate budgets and make the relevant assumptions with reasonable accuracy, as long as they are methodical in going through each stage of litigation and the steps they entail.
Counsel should be able to estimate, for example, the attorneys who will be needed, their levels (partner, senior associate, associate), and their respective rates. Counsel should also be able to estimate the approximate volume of documents that will be involved, the number of fact witnesses and expert witnesses who will need to be interviewed and deposed, the number of deposition hours required, when they will begin taking depositions, when they will file non-dispositive and/or dispositive motions, and so on throughout the duration of the matter. It is simply a matter of using past experience and methodical analysis to break the case down into its parts, then estimate the costs and relevant time period for each part.
For example, in a breach of contract case, counsel might estimate that a partner and associate will interview a key employee/fact witness for eight hours, then later prepare the witness for her deposition for six hours and then have the partner present the witness for deposition for six hours. By simply multiplying the hourly rates of the partner and associate by the number of projected hours they will spend interviewing, then preparing, then presenting the witness -- counsel can calculate the budget for this aspect of the case.
SIMPLE TOOLS HELP
Regardless of all the various software products being marketed for litigation budgeting, they are only as good as the information that is input into them. Simple Excel spreadsheets that break a budget down into key tasks and phases of a case work perfectly well. For example, using the ABA task codes can be an excellent way of focusing on all the steps in the litigation process. And by using the formulas in Excel, counsel can easily modify the budget by adjusting one or move variables (e.g., attorney's hourly rate, or estimate time spent on a task), which will then adjust the other variables and figures, as necessary.
Some budgeting tools incorporate deadlines and the ability to look at previous work in analyzing costs and budgeting future items. Of course, people will inevitably record some functions differently, which may put certain tasks over-budget and others under; and the inherent unpredictability of litigation can always cause events to be delayed, pushed up, short-circuited or extended. But just because budgets are not perfect, that is no reason not to use them. If nothing else, they force counsel to think hard about the time and resources committed to a case.
Indeed, it's very much like doing a family budget. When expenses approach budget limits, it's time for lower-cost alternatives, such as sending an associate -- instead of a partner -- to a meeting or deposition (when appropriate). Time-and-expense tracking and promptly notifying the client when costs begin to bump up against the budget is the way to reduce those unpleasant surprises that can harm counsel-client relationships.
Any relationship, however, is a two-way street, making it important for in-house and outside counsel to agree on their expectations of what constitutes a "fair" budget. Will the budget become a de facto, maximum-fee arrangement? What happens if outside counsel is too far under or over budget? How will that be handled internally, and how will it be handled with outside counsel? No one can predict the future with complete accuracy, but they can establish guidelines of fairness and protocols for what to do when estimates are significantly off the mark.
Finally, a modest proposal to corporate legal departments: Offer to pay for outside counsel's time spent preparing a budget. Have that time included in the budget and offer to work with outside counsel in preparing a thorough, carefully considered budget. That will help make the point that budgeting is important to the client, as is continuous communication about any needed ad-justments to it as the matter progresses.
If both outside counsel and client approach litigation budgeting in a methodical way, drawing on their respective personal and institutional experiences, then litigation budgeting shouldn't require any clairvoyance or pain medication. And in-house attorneys responsible for their own legal department's budget will finally be able to sleep at night.
David Levy is a partner in the litigation, international, and intellectual property and technology departments at Fulbright & Jaworski. He is also the co-chair of the firm's firm's Asia Pacific Practice Group. Levy focuses his domestic and international trial practice on complex litigation matters that range from class actions to patent infringement cases.
This practice of budgeting litigation is certainly the way to go for general counsel. While you may never be comfortable with the high cost of litigation, with legal budgeting, you need not lose sleep over the final bill.
Litigation Budgeting: No Crystal Ball RequiredDavid J. LevyThe Corporate CounselorFebruary 15, 2006
Litigation may be simply one of the costs of doing business, but it's no secret that the difficulty in predicting those costs adds to the frustration in corporate legal departments. Concerns about costs and how to control or predict them weave their way throughout a survey of corporate litigation trends commissioned for the second consecutive year by Fulbright & Jaworski, and conducted by an independent research firm. (The 2005 survey was comprised of written responses from 354 in-house attorneys, including 50 in the United Kingdom. Most of the respondents held the title of General Counsel, Legal Director or a similar senior-level position in their respective legal departments.) This article discusses one of the most effective, yet surprisingly underutilized tools for managing litigation costs: the litigation budget from outside counsel.
A RECURRENT THEME: COSTS, COSTS, COSTS
Even when not directly addressed in the survey questions, the survey participants often injected the subject of litigation costs into their answers. For example, when asked for specific examples of their top litigation concerns, nearly one in five mentioned the costs of litigation as one of their top concerns rather than any specific type of litigation. In fact, costs were among the top two concerns mentioned across all eight industries that were represented in the survey. And litigation costs ate up the biggest chunk of the total corporate legal budget in the manufacturing, energy and insurance industries.
It is not surprising, then, that "cost efficiency" was ranked second only to "results" among the criteria used in measuring the success of legal departments, as well as that of individual attorneys in the department. Survey participants also expected more litigation and rising costs in the future. Participants, therefore, want future surveys to continue to inquire about ways that corporate legal departments are trying to manage and reduce litigation costs.
In fact, when asked for the one message they would like to deliver to their outside counsel, the most frequent answer involved "controlling costs." The verbatim answers ranged from the metaphorical ("Sharpen your pencil"), to the direct ("Cut your fees"), to the diplomatic ("Be very careful in your billing practices and keep legal fees as reasonable as possible"). Others emphasized the need to be updated regularly on costs ("Keep me informed of your day-to-day activities so that I am better able to estimate costs" and "Communicate with us, let us know how we are doing"). And when asked what one phrase they most hate hearing from their law firm, the answer often centered on cost surprises ("Sorry, we have gone over budget," "It cost more than we expected") and uncertainty ("Can't estimate the costs").
However phrased, the answer across industries, geographic regions and size of companies was clear: Litigation costs -- and especially the unpleasant surprises from them are an ongoing source of tension between clients and outside counsel.
E-DISCOVERY COSTS AND LIABILITIES
Adding to the dilemma of cost control is the fact that a growing component of litigation costs — and one that needs careful consideration in budgeting -- is electronic discovery. To be sure, the initial estimates from outside firms for document collection and management process may often sound reasonable (e.g., $2000 per gigabyte, or $200 per hour). But in a complex matter, that bill may quickly soar to six figures, or even seven, especially after adding per-page charges for putting documents into a database, converting them to appropriate file formats, producing them and other related charges. Indeed, in large cases, seven-figure e-discovery costs are not uncommon -- especially if the costs are not properly managed.
Thus, particularly in class actions, multi-district litigations, patent litigation cases and other complicated, document-intensive cases, clients need to closely examine their outside law firms' capabilities and experience in creating and managing the electronic discovery process. This includes the ability to most efficiently and effectively use document repositories and otherwise handle document production. If they do not have sufficient experience, they may not achieve the cost control or predictability that clients want.
Companies can also have a hand in reducing their e-discovery costs. Those corporations that have established an internal procedure for locating, organizing and producing documents without the need for outside help can save substantial amounts of money. This may be beyond the bandwidth of smaller legal departments, but it can be an important cost saver for companies with the legal infrastructure to do it.
However, even small companies can save money by taking a proactive approach in their normal business operations with written record retention policies and litigation hold policies designed for today's electronic data world. Hanging over the process of e-discovery, of course, is the threat of spoliation (intentional destruction of, or failure to preserve, evidence for pending or reasonably foreseeable litigation). Spoliation can have a major impact on the outcome of a case, since one of the possible sanctions is an instruction from the judge to infer that the "destroyed" documents in question would have been adverse to the party's case. Other sanctions, ranging from monetary fines to striking of all pleadings can also have disastrous consequences and cause a case to turn on how it was handled, as opposed to the underlying facts and laws.
The cost of not being well prepared at all times for litigation in the management of information has been demonstrated in several high-profile cases in recent years. The notorious labor/employment case, Zubulake v. UBS Warburg LLC, resulted in a $28 million jury award and a series of rulings by the judge outlining more clearly the duty-to-preserve responsibilities and actions that both in-house and outside counsel should take to meet them. Last year's finding of document/data destruction in Coleman v. Morgan Stanley was part of the reason for the approximately $1.5 billion damages award. In both cases, and others, the failure or inability of companies to produce all of the documents subpoenaed in a timely manner contributed significantly to the negative outcome of the case.
The good news is that the survey findings showed that companies are getting the message. Three-quarters of the companies in the survey had litigation hold policies in place, and 45 percent of those had revised their policies in the past year. The same was true with written records retention policies where 82 percent of the total sample had policies and 62 percent of those companies had revised their policies in the past year. The high level of revisions probably indicates an appreciation that electronic discovery is a rapidly changing area of the law and requires close monitoring.
Litigation hold policies, however, do not help to control costs. Indeed, the Catch-22 is that the preservation of vast amounts of data for litigation is more likely to increase not only the litigation costs, but also their unpredictability.
BUDGETING: SOLUTION, NOT PROBLEM
Despite the obvious cost concerns, the Litigation Trends Survey showed that efforts to predict and manage litigation costs are sketchy, at best, in the corporate world. Surprisingly, just 37 percent of the companies in the survey require a budget from their outside law firms for all their litigation matters; and only another 11 percent require budgets more than half of the time. (Tracking time-to-resolution for litigation matters is another practice that is apparently far from universal. Although 22 percent of the sample said they always track time-to-resolution, more than half never do it.)
It is certainly true that unforeseen events occur over the course of a matter, and no one has perfect vision when looking out 12 to 24 months, or more, into the future. Still, experienced litigators -- and in-house attorneys -- can draw on their collective experiences in projecting what tasks will need to be performed and estimating how many attorney hours will be required for each task, what the expenses for each task will be, and how long each "phase" of the case will last — if only they would take the time to really focus on it. Working together, outside and in-house counsel can therefore formulate budgets and make the relevant assumptions with reasonable accuracy, as long as they are methodical in going through each stage of litigation and the steps they entail.
Counsel should be able to estimate, for example, the attorneys who will be needed, their levels (partner, senior associate, associate), and their respective rates. Counsel should also be able to estimate the approximate volume of documents that will be involved, the number of fact witnesses and expert witnesses who will need to be interviewed and deposed, the number of deposition hours required, when they will begin taking depositions, when they will file non-dispositive and/or dispositive motions, and so on throughout the duration of the matter. It is simply a matter of using past experience and methodical analysis to break the case down into its parts, then estimate the costs and relevant time period for each part.
For example, in a breach of contract case, counsel might estimate that a partner and associate will interview a key employee/fact witness for eight hours, then later prepare the witness for her deposition for six hours and then have the partner present the witness for deposition for six hours. By simply multiplying the hourly rates of the partner and associate by the number of projected hours they will spend interviewing, then preparing, then presenting the witness -- counsel can calculate the budget for this aspect of the case.
SIMPLE TOOLS HELP
Regardless of all the various software products being marketed for litigation budgeting, they are only as good as the information that is input into them. Simple Excel spreadsheets that break a budget down into key tasks and phases of a case work perfectly well. For example, using the ABA task codes can be an excellent way of focusing on all the steps in the litigation process. And by using the formulas in Excel, counsel can easily modify the budget by adjusting one or move variables (e.g., attorney's hourly rate, or estimate time spent on a task), which will then adjust the other variables and figures, as necessary.
Some budgeting tools incorporate deadlines and the ability to look at previous work in analyzing costs and budgeting future items. Of course, people will inevitably record some functions differently, which may put certain tasks over-budget and others under; and the inherent unpredictability of litigation can always cause events to be delayed, pushed up, short-circuited or extended. But just because budgets are not perfect, that is no reason not to use them. If nothing else, they force counsel to think hard about the time and resources committed to a case.
Indeed, it's very much like doing a family budget. When expenses approach budget limits, it's time for lower-cost alternatives, such as sending an associate -- instead of a partner -- to a meeting or deposition (when appropriate). Time-and-expense tracking and promptly notifying the client when costs begin to bump up against the budget is the way to reduce those unpleasant surprises that can harm counsel-client relationships.
Any relationship, however, is a two-way street, making it important for in-house and outside counsel to agree on their expectations of what constitutes a "fair" budget. Will the budget become a de facto, maximum-fee arrangement? What happens if outside counsel is too far under or over budget? How will that be handled internally, and how will it be handled with outside counsel? No one can predict the future with complete accuracy, but they can establish guidelines of fairness and protocols for what to do when estimates are significantly off the mark.
Finally, a modest proposal to corporate legal departments: Offer to pay for outside counsel's time spent preparing a budget. Have that time included in the budget and offer to work with outside counsel in preparing a thorough, carefully considered budget. That will help make the point that budgeting is important to the client, as is continuous communication about any needed ad-justments to it as the matter progresses.
If both outside counsel and client approach litigation budgeting in a methodical way, drawing on their respective personal and institutional experiences, then litigation budgeting shouldn't require any clairvoyance or pain medication. And in-house attorneys responsible for their own legal department's budget will finally be able to sleep at night.
David Levy is a partner in the litigation, international, and intellectual property and technology departments at Fulbright & Jaworski. He is also the co-chair of the firm's firm's Asia Pacific Practice Group. Levy focuses his domestic and international trial practice on complex litigation matters that range from class actions to patent infringement cases.
Thursday, February 09, 2006
Legal Outsourcing Taps into 'intellectual capital'
LegalEase Solutions featured in the front pages of the Detroit Legal News
B CHRISTINE L. MOBLEY Legal News Legal outsourcing has been profiled as an easy way for attorneys, law firms, and even large Fortune 500 companies to save not only money but time as well. Michigan is home to three fledgling legal outsourcing firms. Among these outsourcing service providers is LegalEase Solutions L.L.C. According to Tariq Akbar, CEO of LegalEase Solutions L.L.C., the company began in 2004 and has three offices worldwide: one in Canton, Mich. and two others in Cochin and Chennai, India. One advantage to legal outsourcing would be that projects could be done in a more time efficient manner. “With a company like ours — where we do a third of the work here in the United States, and the rest of it is done offshore — you virtually have a 24-hour workforce,” Tariq Hafeez, LegalEase Solutions L.L.C. president and general counsel, said. “Basically, around 10 p.m. here, in Michigan, is 8 o’clock in the morning in India, so we can have our attorneys working here until 5 or 6 p.m. in Michigan and then after a four hour gap, the work is picked up again in India. So we can get large projects done, or even short projects done; at a much shorter time than it would take otherwise.” According to the LegalEase Solutions Web site, once a client has contacted LegalEase Solutions and their information is collected, the information is transferred over to lawyers in India, the project is then researched and prepared and reviewed, and then given back to the client for their review and use of the product. The India-based attorneys have access to Lexis Nexis and other online research tools in order to complete projects from any jurisdiction, according to the site, and India-based legal professionals must have a minimum of five years experience before being hired by LegalEase Solutions.
“The people we’re working with are truly some of the smartest and brightest people we have met internationally;’ Akbar said. “These are really smart, creative, and talented people and what we’re doing is tapping into their intellectual capital. You’re actually tapping into this huge, vast resource of the rest of the world who are willing to direct their creative talents, their minds towards making the entire legal industry a little more efficient.”
“Lawyers have just begun to realize that outsourcing can benefit them just as outsourcing has benefited other industries in the United States,” Hafeez said. There may be those that are concerned or unwilling to turn to legal outsourcing for fear of displacement, however, Akbar disagrees and believes that legal outsourcing is not only a “new trend” but “it’s becoming a necessity” “So much of the law is not just sitting at a desk writing and researching — so much of it is actually active negotiation, face-to-face contact, being in court, and none of that is going to be threatened by outsourcing,” Hafeez agreed. “What we serve to do is make the process a lot more efficient:’ Akbar said. “Nearly all kinds of law firms and legal departments can use our services in some capacity,” Akbar noted. “Our main clients today are firms with a lot of litigation work who need the litigation support and corporate legal departments who are interested in cutting costs and keeping some work in-house.” “This is probably a good time for lawyers and law firms to try legal outsourcing out because a company like ours is really willing to engineer our processes around our clients. If we have a client who wants things done in a very specific way — we’ll make sure to do it that way because were new enough and we want to’ bring on. as much clientele as possible,” Hafeez said. “We don’t even invoice our clients until they are satisfied with our work, so it’s really a no risk proposition.” For more information on LegalEase Solutions L.L.C., call1-866-534-6177 or visit their Web site at wwwiegaleasesolutions.com.
B CHRISTINE L. MOBLEY Legal News Legal outsourcing has been profiled as an easy way for attorneys, law firms, and even large Fortune 500 companies to save not only money but time as well. Michigan is home to three fledgling legal outsourcing firms. Among these outsourcing service providers is LegalEase Solutions L.L.C. According to Tariq Akbar, CEO of LegalEase Solutions L.L.C., the company began in 2004 and has three offices worldwide: one in Canton, Mich. and two others in Cochin and Chennai, India. One advantage to legal outsourcing would be that projects could be done in a more time efficient manner. “With a company like ours — where we do a third of the work here in the United States, and the rest of it is done offshore — you virtually have a 24-hour workforce,” Tariq Hafeez, LegalEase Solutions L.L.C. president and general counsel, said. “Basically, around 10 p.m. here, in Michigan, is 8 o’clock in the morning in India, so we can have our attorneys working here until 5 or 6 p.m. in Michigan and then after a four hour gap, the work is picked up again in India. So we can get large projects done, or even short projects done; at a much shorter time than it would take otherwise.” According to the LegalEase Solutions Web site, once a client has contacted LegalEase Solutions and their information is collected, the information is transferred over to lawyers in India, the project is then researched and prepared and reviewed, and then given back to the client for their review and use of the product. The India-based attorneys have access to Lexis Nexis and other online research tools in order to complete projects from any jurisdiction, according to the site, and India-based legal professionals must have a minimum of five years experience before being hired by LegalEase Solutions.
“The people we’re working with are truly some of the smartest and brightest people we have met internationally;’ Akbar said. “These are really smart, creative, and talented people and what we’re doing is tapping into their intellectual capital. You’re actually tapping into this huge, vast resource of the rest of the world who are willing to direct their creative talents, their minds towards making the entire legal industry a little more efficient.”
“Lawyers have just begun to realize that outsourcing can benefit them just as outsourcing has benefited other industries in the United States,” Hafeez said. There may be those that are concerned or unwilling to turn to legal outsourcing for fear of displacement, however, Akbar disagrees and believes that legal outsourcing is not only a “new trend” but “it’s becoming a necessity” “So much of the law is not just sitting at a desk writing and researching — so much of it is actually active negotiation, face-to-face contact, being in court, and none of that is going to be threatened by outsourcing,” Hafeez agreed. “What we serve to do is make the process a lot more efficient:’ Akbar said. “Nearly all kinds of law firms and legal departments can use our services in some capacity,” Akbar noted. “Our main clients today are firms with a lot of litigation work who need the litigation support and corporate legal departments who are interested in cutting costs and keeping some work in-house.” “This is probably a good time for lawyers and law firms to try legal outsourcing out because a company like ours is really willing to engineer our processes around our clients. If we have a client who wants things done in a very specific way — we’ll make sure to do it that way because were new enough and we want to’ bring on. as much clientele as possible,” Hafeez said. “We don’t even invoice our clients until they are satisfied with our work, so it’s really a no risk proposition.” For more information on LegalEase Solutions L.L.C., call1-866-534-6177 or visit their Web site at wwwiegaleasesolutions.com.
Monday, February 06, 2006
Challenges of Going Solo
Young Attorneys Who Go Solo Face Hurdles but Reap Rewards
Hope Caldwell
The Legal Intelligencer02-06-2006
A new year always pushes people to make resolutions -- some vow to lose weight, find love or quit smoking. For young attorneys, starting one's own firm or business might be a goal, but for some it always remains just that: a goal
For attorneys working at firms, finding time to meet all of the requisite billable hours is the stressor that overtakes each day. However, for the solo practitioner, the stressor in their day is not limited to the billable hour but rather to a myriad of other concerns: marketing, administrative work, filing motions, arguing motions, answering the phone and paying the office bills, to name a few. The list goes on for solo practitioners trying to start their own business while providing a valuable service to their clients.
For solo practioners, more so than attorneys at firms, time management and optimizing one's use of time is paramount. Time-intensive legal research and writing and general document review is often times a crucial aspect of most solo attorneys' work load. Solos should really take a hard look at how legal outsourcing can help them manage their workload and still do a quality job for their clients.
LegalEase Solutions' client base consists of a healthy number of solo practitioners, who often times rely on LegalEase's research and writing services to get work completed on time. Moreover, as solos often don't have the luxury of having someone to ask for advice, the inexpensive use of legal outsourcing companies can help solos cope with the knowledge and experience deficit they often times inevitably have.
www.lgles.com
Hope Caldwell
The Legal Intelligencer02-06-2006
A new year always pushes people to make resolutions -- some vow to lose weight, find love or quit smoking. For young attorneys, starting one's own firm or business might be a goal, but for some it always remains just that: a goal
For attorneys working at firms, finding time to meet all of the requisite billable hours is the stressor that overtakes each day. However, for the solo practitioner, the stressor in their day is not limited to the billable hour but rather to a myriad of other concerns: marketing, administrative work, filing motions, arguing motions, answering the phone and paying the office bills, to name a few. The list goes on for solo practitioners trying to start their own business while providing a valuable service to their clients.
For solo practioners, more so than attorneys at firms, time management and optimizing one's use of time is paramount. Time-intensive legal research and writing and general document review is often times a crucial aspect of most solo attorneys' work load. Solos should really take a hard look at how legal outsourcing can help them manage their workload and still do a quality job for their clients.
LegalEase Solutions' client base consists of a healthy number of solo practitioners, who often times rely on LegalEase's research and writing services to get work completed on time. Moreover, as solos often don't have the luxury of having someone to ask for advice, the inexpensive use of legal outsourcing companies can help solos cope with the knowledge and experience deficit they often times inevitably have.
www.lgles.com
Thursday, February 02, 2006
Legal Demographics
Last night I attended a meeting of the American Inns of the Court , The Michigan State University College of Law American Inn of Court chapter. They featured a panel which showcased the trends in legal demographics and included some highly experienced, qualified and erudite lawyers .... and Tariq Hafeez. Tariq was easily atleast 30 years younger than the next youngest member of the panel.
What made the organization so interested in Tariq Hafeez was what he was trying to do with the legal profession - outsource it! Partners from some very large firms shook their heads in disbelief as the very concept. Yet at the very same time people were able to grasp the simple logic of its possibilities. But it has become more than a concept and is a reality.
Lawyers are becoming more cognizant of the changes within the legal profession. Another interesting fact that came out of the meeting was that there is an ever increasing number of International students who are stuyding American Law. In a new global economy and there seems to be emerging a truly global workforce of professionals networked from different parts of the world working toward common goals.
The forum had an excellently organized event which encouraged discourse and dissemination of knowedge.
What made the organization so interested in Tariq Hafeez was what he was trying to do with the legal profession - outsource it! Partners from some very large firms shook their heads in disbelief as the very concept. Yet at the very same time people were able to grasp the simple logic of its possibilities. But it has become more than a concept and is a reality.
Lawyers are becoming more cognizant of the changes within the legal profession. Another interesting fact that came out of the meeting was that there is an ever increasing number of International students who are stuyding American Law. In a new global economy and there seems to be emerging a truly global workforce of professionals networked from different parts of the world working toward common goals.
The forum had an excellently organized event which encouraged discourse and dissemination of knowedge.
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