The survey with the question, “Which service are you outsourcing/ considering to outsource/ supporting?” ran for one year on this blog. The picture above shows the results. About half of the respondents chose Legal Research and Contract Review/Drafting/Management as the service of interest to them. About 35% showed interest in IP offshoring and a similar percentage in Document Review and eDiscovery. Immigration Services support, Secretarial Services support within the legal community and other custom services (I guess document indexing, coding and tagging etc.) found interest among about 15% of the respondents.
Using estimations on the visitors and co-relation to proportion of visitors actually participating in the survey it appears that more than a 100 Law firms and a 100 Legal Departments participated in the survey. The other participants include LPO employees (about 80) and some other curious participants.
Even the interest from 200 law firms and legal departments (combined) is a phenomenon worth mentioning. On a conservative side too, it would be safe to assume that at least half of these companies are already engaged in offshoring of legal work. Confidentiality will bar reporting the names of such law firms and companies but an analysis on the blog visitors reveals that these law firms include the biggest of the names all the way thru to the smallest of law firms. Smaller law firms have been more agile in using LPO while the bigger law firms have been cautious but exploratory nonetheless. Corporations using legal offshoring probably are more homogeneously spread-out, perhaps companies with $100m+ in revenues are better equipped to embracing (or more in need of) LPO.
This blog invites you to confidentially participate in the new survey (see right panel): What was your estimated spending on offshore legal work in 2008?
