NetApp

Matthew Karlyn
Senior Counsel
Foley & Lardner


Connie Brenton
Chief of Staff/Director Legal Operations
NetApp

Legal Process Outsourcing (LPO) refers to a set of activities that are comparatively new in the world of outsourcing and offshoring, but in which interest and experience are rapidly growing.  As corporate legal departments and their outside counsel look at legal services and consider how, where, and by whom different tasks and activities should be done, the usual questions around performance, build or buy, pricing, confidentiality and data security, and relationship management arise.  Successfully outsourcing legal services, however, also poses additional important challenges about business models, professional ethics, the lawyer-client relationship and privileged communications, and the complexity of a three-way relationship among corporate legal departments, outside counsel and LPO providers.  

This chapter will welcome individuals with extensive experience and insights into the world of LPO, as well as those with questions or who are just beginning to enter the LPO market, to learn from each other and network with customers, advisors and providers of LPO from around the world.

Quarterly

Virtual

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Meeting held on December 3, 2010

The IAOP Legal Process Outsourcing Chapter, chaired by Vantage Partners and Foley & Lardner LLP, held a webinar on December 3, 2010. 

"Challenges (and Mitigation Strategies) in the Selection and Management of LPO Relationships."

The meeting of the LPO Chapter took a closer look at the unique challenges associated with services delivered by an LPO compared to our experiences in other types of outsourcing.  For example, during selection time, Sourcing & Procurement may have to work closely not only with internal consumers of legal services, but also with in-house counsel who will have to be comfortable both with the contract, and with the quality of services delivered by an LPO provider. In some cases, outside counsel's views on provider selection may need to be considered as they have an ethical obligation to provide a supervisory role in some LPO services.  During the management of the relationship, the client, outside counsel and the LPO will all play a role in managing the sensitive three-way relationship.  

To help us take a closer look at some of these challenges and how early adopters have addressed them, we examined an LPO process map to zero in on the highest risk areas for execution and consider potential approaches to managing those risks.
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Relaunched on September 14, 2010

The IAOP Legal Process Outsourcing Chapter, chaired by Vantage Partners, Oracle and Foley & Lardner LLP, relaunched on September 14, 2010.

The Growth of Legal Process Outsourcing: Implications for Law Firms, Their Clients, and LPO Providers

The Legal Process Outsourcing (LPO) market is still relatively young and quite limited compared to well-established ITO and BPO markets, but it is growing rapidly. In this webinar and panel discussion, we will consider the implications for providers, law firms, and their clients, of LPO’s continued evolution and maturation: 

• As client organizations reconsider which specific tasks can be automated, outsourced, or delegated to a broader range of outside law firms, they will be posing some tough questions to their lawyers. In-house counsel will have the opportunity to learn from what other functions and sourcing professionals in their own organizations have already experienced, but will need to adapt those lessons to the realities of the practice of law in an increasingly complex and regulated world.
• Outside counsel, in turn, will have to rethink their own staffing models, the kinds of services they offer, and how they should manage different kinds of client relationships. They have critical strategic choices to make about which capabilities to build and for which to partner, how to position a global service solution, and how deeply into their own delivery model to look for efficiencies. 
• LPO providers, many of whom have started out by positioning their services at the most basic and commoditized end of the legal service spectrum, will need to evolve as the market demand for their services moves: law firms looking for help not only with legal or paralegal tasks, but also with their own back offices; corporate clients looking not only to reduce the costs of commoditized services like document review and some patent filings, but also to provide new value-added services to their internal clients that might not have previously been thought to be affordable.

In this webinar, Danny Ertel, a partner with Vantage Partners, will facilitate a strategic discussion about LPO, the current reality and its potential near term implications, with four of the industry’s most thoughtful practitioners.

Panelists:
Connie Brenton, Oracle
Matt Karlyn, Foley & Lardner
Mark Ross, Integreon
Kunoor Chopra, Lawscribe