India Business Law Journal recognizes six of the best legal process outsourcing providers with operations in India. By Rebecca Abraham
As in-house legal teams and law firms seek to provide more for less, the technology that is driving innovation in the legal services arena is recognized as being all-important. Yet questions continue to be asked about how much technology is appropriate and to what extent it can replace tasks traditionally done by lawyers.
So, while leading legal process outsourcing providers (LPOs) continue to face growing demand – an estimate in the National Law Review put the value of outsourceable legal work in the US market alone at US$20 billion – the heady growth experienced by the sector in its initial days appears to be over.
It is against this backdrop that India Business Law Journal presents its seventh annual Legal Process Outsourcing Awards. Our 2015 awards differ from out past awards as we recognize six Best Overall LPOs but stop short of naming a single service provider as LPO of the Year.
India Business Law Journal’s six Best Overall LPOs for 2015 are: Clutch Group, Integreon, Mindcrest, Pangea3, QuisLex and UnitedLex.
Our research leads us to conclude that while the competition at the top has triggered great benefits for clients, there is no clear leader at present. A description of our methodology and judging criteria is provided below.
[ihc-hide-content ihc_mb_type=”show” ihc_mb_who=”3″ ihc_mb_template=”2″ ]
New name on the list
With over 600 employees, 463 of whom are based in India, Clutch Group enters the ranks of India Business Law Journal’s Best Overall LPOs for the first time this year. We have tracked Clutch over the years watching as it has gone from strength to strength.
In June Clutch widened its footprint when it opened an office in Hong Kong. This was done to facilitate compliance with Asian data security requirements, streamline offerings for clients with offices in the Asia-Pacific region, and support clients in Singapore and China. The Washington DC-based LPO already had offices and review centres in New York, Chicago, Zurich and London. It has also recruited staff with experience at leading regulatory bodies such as the Financial Conduct Authority and the Serious Fraud Office in the UK, and the Independent Commission Against Corruption in Hong Kong.Clutch Group says its clients include “some of the world’s largest financial services, energy, and medical technology companies” and its recent work includes helping a global financial services company respond to “an enormous” regulatory request. For this it used advanced analytic tools, including predictive coding, to identify and review key documents that made up 1% of 5.5 terabytes of data that needed to be sifted through. Clutch says it also carried out a comprehensive email restoration, processing, analytics and review exercise on behalf of a global financial services organization, and put together a law and mandate database for one of the world’s largest financial institutions.
Methodology and judging criteria
India Business Law Journal’s LPO awards are based on quantitative and qualitative survey data combined with qualitative feedback from outsourcing clients
A survey was sent by email to several hundred prospective and existing clients of legal process outsourcing services. Recipients were typically senior in-house counsel at major international companies and partners at regional and international law firms.
The responses provided were taken into account by our editorial team during the judging process. Some clients have also been quoted in the awards coverage, but others requested anonymity.
A separate survey was sent to LPO providers. Each was invited to support its candidacy for the awards by submitting details of notable achievements, what it sees as its key strengths and also client references. LPO providers were also asked to indicate which of their competitors they judged to be leaders in the field.
India Business Law Journal’s editorial team used a combination of objective data and subjective analysis in reaching its final decisions. The numeric data collected from the two surveys formed the basis of the results, but was considered alongside the subjective comments and insights received from LPO clients around the world. The submissions received from LPO service providers were also considered as part of this process, as were the references provided by their clients.
Six winners of equal standing have been selected as Best Overall LPOs.
In 2014, Varun Mehta, the vice president of legal and compliance solutions at Clutch Group said Clutch had seen a ten-fold increase in its IT budget while its IT team had increased 14 times and its data storage capabilities almost 35 times. This is clearly a key focus of this LPO, which, according to Mehta, functions in an area where clients need more than a support function.
“We work with our clients in a proactive manner to make sure they are not only complying with regulations, but also ensuring that they are ready for any legal issue that may arise,” says Mehta. “2015 proved that this agility is a differentiator amongst LPOs, enabling agile providers to jump ahead of their less agile competitors.”
At the cutting edge
Over the years Integreon has been consistently recognized as a leading LPO in India Business Law Journal’s annual awards. With operations in the Philippines, the US, the UK and South Africa apart from India, this LPO has long had an impressive list of clients, including Microsoft, for which it provides contract review services with resources based in the UK and India.
Work from a new client, Pfizer, prompted Integreon to open a new 14,000-square-foot facility in Austin, Texas, in July. The facility is designed for over 100 contract and full-time associates. Integreon, which has 1,200 employees in India and 2,500 elsewhere, stresses that its facility in Austin “does not replace any previous existing facilities and was opened because of a need for additional capacity for the company’s legal and document services”.
In a move which Eric Feistel, the vice president of marketing, says should help with “recruiting and retention, as well as improved service delivery for clients”, Integreon has recently relocated its office in Mumbai to new premises located within a 65-acre campus.
As for the future, Mark Ross, Integreon’s global head of LPO, says “bold action” is required to overcome the ongoing challenges faced by the legal profession. He sees potential for LPOs to move “beyond collaboration and into bifurcated relationships in which the LPOs would likely supplant the junior associate base of the traditional law firm pyramid organizational structure”.
Small is beautiful
With approximately 300 employees in India and 150 outside India, Mindcrest is the smallest of our Best Overall LPOs.
Reported achievements over the past 12 months include designing and building a knowledge management solution to help clients with their contracts life-cycle management programmes, and adding a data analytics module to a governance risk and compliance management solution.
Mindcrest has been in operation since 2001 and, like other LPOs, it uses a combination of onshore and offshore teams to serve its clients, who are mainly in the US. It reports that it is in the process of augmenting its onshore delivery capabilities in the US with a new delivery centre in Chicago. In 2014 it had upgraded its sales office in New York to a delivery centre.
Remarking that it is no longer “just about having a labour force of talented attorneys”, Ganesh Natarajan, CEO of Mindcrest, says clients are looking for solutions that combine industry expertise, process excellence and data analytics. Clients are impressed and praise its flexibility, accessibility and quick response time.
Consistent quality
Praised by clients and peers alike, Pangea3, which five years ago was acquired by Thomson Reuters, has been consistently recognized as a Best Overall LPO.
“They always strive to expand their offerings while augmenting existing services,” remarks Nicole Mason, who is part of the legal operations team at Varian Medical Systems. Mason adds that the services Pangea3 provides are such that “we are able to have their people interact directly with our business clients”.
This is typical of what people say about this LPO, which prides itself on using the best legal talent, expertly designed processes and cutting-edge technology to provide its services.
Increasing footprint
QuisLex, with operations in Hyderabad, New York, Chicago and London, is another Best Overall LPO winner.
Over the past 12 months its reported achievements include providing services to VMware, a company that provides cloud and virtualization software, when it was looking to improve its contract management services. VMware had first used QuisLex’s services around 2011, when it was looking to reallocate low-value, low-risk, repetitive work streams, but more recently it used this LPO when it needed contract review and template maintenance services.
Ram Vasudevan, CEO of QuisLex, says it saw a large increase in regulatory work coming out of the UK and EU, and responded by opening an office in London earlier this year. It is scheduled to open large-scale delivery centres in both London and New York in the near future.
Vasudevan believes that “QuisLex will quickly differentiate its managed document review services from alternative options by introducing a high level of process and organizational maturity to a market unaccustomed to these rigours”.
A client who wishes to remain anonymous praises QuisLex for its “consistent quality, ability to support new projects and legal support needs,” while Allen Murphy, a third party programme director at Tyco, applauds the LPO for the quality of its work, remarking that it has consistently been at a level that meets or exceeds expectations. Tyco recently increased the amount of work it outsources to QuisLex by 5%, when it asked the LPO to perform contract reviews on existing contracts.
QuisLex, which prides itself on using on permanent employees, reports that it has more than a 1,000 employees – 100 more than a year ago.
Universal recognition
Another winner of this year’s Best Overall LPOs award is UnitedLex, which also appears to be valued by clients and peers alike.
In June it announced that it was collaborating with Hewlett-Packard to “help resource-constrained organizations overcome the challenges that they face when implementing and managing a best-practice security operations center”.This LPO, with headquarters in Overland Park, Kansas, has more than 1,800 attorneys, engineers and consultants, who the company says work to “drive seven and eight figure benefits to its clients”. UnitedLex recently announced it was to provide a variety of litigation support services to the 17 offices of Sedgwick, a San Francisco-based law firm that focuses on litigation and insurance. UnitedLex said it had “hired and trained a team of professionals who are exclusively dedicated to supporting Sedgwick’s clients”.
Working with high-profile clients such as this has ensured UnitedLex a place among India Business Law Journal’s top six LPOs.
[/ihc-hide-content]
Casting a wider gaze
Clients seeking LPO solutions may find a broader range of options if they look beyond the niche providers
Some law firms and in-house legal teams that are seeking efficiencies from both a cost and process point of view are shunning niche LPO players in favour of business process outsourcing providers (BPOs) that also offer legal services. A company that has done this for several years is Sony Corporation of America, the US arm of Sony.
Sony America uses Evalueserve, which provides research, analytics, and data management services and prides itself on having what it says is one of the largest intellectual property search and analytics teams in the industry, with over 350 professionals. According to Toshimoto Mitomo, executive vice president for IP at Sony America, the “quality of their service is very good”.
Sony America used Pangea3 until 2011, but then began using Evalueserve, which Mitomo described as more “creative and cost-effective”, in a comment to India Business Law Journal in November 2011.
Another BPO that is recognized for its legal services is Infosys BPO, a subsidiary of New York Stock Exchange-listed Infosys. Clients of the legal process outsourcing (LPO) arm of Infosys BPO include Springer, a scientific, technical and medical publisher based in the Netherlands, where Joop Van Niel, executive vice president for shared services, says: “We are very happy with them, which is also the reason why we continue to [use] them.”
Infosys BPO is Springer’s only LPO services provider. It provides contract management services for Springer’s books and journals business, which involves maintaining contracts and extracting meta-data from the contracts. “This work was done in-house earlier, but it was something that wasn’t done properly in our own organization and we decided to use them to do it better,” remarks Van Niel. “They are doing a great job and are very enthusiastic about the way they work.”
Praise such as this particularly significant as it comes from a client in Europe, where reservations about the business model are seen. Van Niel says his colleagues are “in general are not so keen” about outsourcing. “Some of them have not worked with people in India, but they learn otherwise very quickly.”
