LPO: Clients look for scale

A reader of this blog, Claire, wrote in expressing her strengthened confidence in Centric (now acquired by Williams Lea) and put to words what was always suspected to be a top concern on a client/prospect's mind: Supplier's financial health, domain knowledge and ability to scale. Her comments:

My firm here in the UK was pitched to by Centric LPO at the beginning of this year and they did have an interesting proposition i.e. sorry to say, not just India as the solution. They had this matrix of services against locations and it was different. However, since the acquisition by Deutsche Post I think this makes Centric proposition more attractive to us. It's a scale thing. Just having that balance sheet makes you feel more comfortable. I think that's one reason LPO has been in its infancy for what seems like ages. The only real players in the market place, that really understood what they were doing, were really small India based players or big BPO guys with no idea what they were doing in the legal space.

I welcome more comments from readers about their experience of using or providing LPO services - the good, the bad and the ugly!

See also: previous post on the Centric acquisition http://legallyours.blogspot.com/2007/11/lpo-times-of-mammoth.html