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Leaders in Legal Business
at a glacial pace, I will explore the four phases of the LPO adoption process that law firms are traversing.
Technology: Disruptive or Harmonious for LPO?
It is indisputable that developments in technology-assisted document review, automated contract metadata
abstraction, deal rooms, e-billing software, data analytics, knowledge management, and document assembly
technologies are speeding up or significantly reducing the need for manual labor in legal services. While some
might argue that technological advances represent a competitive challenge to LPO, nothing could be further from
the truth. It is technology that led to the advent of LPO, enabling offshore locations to interact with clients
thousands of miles away, and it is the LPO industry that has since continued embracing and incorporating
technology into virtually every element of its legal services delivery offerings, including assisting and advising
corporations and law firms on the selection and implementation of enabling technologies. It is the LPO industry
that now pushes the envelope to redefine the art of possibility in the legal field, providing expert consultants who
can weave together advanced technologies as an integral thread in overall legal process transformation. Detailed
below are a few examples that aptly illustrate how LPO providers are leveraging technology in the provision of
transformative legal services.
Litigation
The days are quickly fading in which huge teams of attorney reviewers tackle hundreds of thousands —
or millions — of seemingly unfiltered documents. Some industry commentators would have you believe that there
is an “us versus them” battle for supremacy between advocates of inefficient, costly manual document review and
the knight in shining armor that is technology-assisted review (TAR). The rationale for these dour predictions
about the role of human review seems predicated on an extreme hypothesis that pits computers against humans
with little consideration for practical realities. The leading LPO providers have long been proselytizers of TAR
workflows and have been constantly developing, testing, and refining these workflows to deliver smarter and less
costly review processes. The choice for corporate clients is no longer “should I employ a TAR workflow?” but
rather, “when should I employ it, and which technology and workflow best suit my needs?” Utilization of these
tools is not always even about reducing the size of the overall document corpus or finding the proverbial “smoking
gun” evidence. LPOs deploy these technologies in a variety of ways, such as to support a quality control process.
The LPO industry, being both expert- and technology-agnostic, is well placed to provide the insights their clients
need to help them choose and deploy these technologies wisely.
Contract Management and Review
LPOs do not only restrict their embrace of technology to the litigation support field. In the corporate
transactional world, the first port of call in any engagement to locate and then review and extract information from
contracts (often triggered by the implementation of a contract lifecycle management system, or following an
acquisition, or as a response to an audit) should be to determine whether technology can assist in the process.
There are tools that can be utilized to locate and collate contracts stored on hard drives, file shares, network drives,
and various software platforms. Once the contracts are found, these tools can index the files and render any text
as fully searchable using optical character recognition (OCR) technology.
After the contracts have been collected and converted to searchable text, the requisite information
important to the business needs to be extracted from each contract. While historically the process of extracting
data from volumes of contractual documentation has been a manual one, this is no longer the case. Once contracts
are made text-searchable, automated metadata extraction and categorization technology can be used to speed up
the process and reduce the costs associated with traditional manual contract review. The technology auto-triages
contracts based on certain business rules, such as the exclusion of expired, duplicate, unsigned, or immaterial
132
at a glacial pace, I will explore the four phases of the LPO adoption process that law firms are traversing.
Technology: Disruptive or Harmonious for LPO?
It is indisputable that developments in technology-assisted document review, automated contract metadata
abstraction, deal rooms, e-billing software, data analytics, knowledge management, and document assembly
technologies are speeding up or significantly reducing the need for manual labor in legal services. While some
might argue that technological advances represent a competitive challenge to LPO, nothing could be further from
the truth. It is technology that led to the advent of LPO, enabling offshore locations to interact with clients
thousands of miles away, and it is the LPO industry that has since continued embracing and incorporating
technology into virtually every element of its legal services delivery offerings, including assisting and advising
corporations and law firms on the selection and implementation of enabling technologies. It is the LPO industry
that now pushes the envelope to redefine the art of possibility in the legal field, providing expert consultants who
can weave together advanced technologies as an integral thread in overall legal process transformation. Detailed
below are a few examples that aptly illustrate how LPO providers are leveraging technology in the provision of
transformative legal services.
Litigation
The days are quickly fading in which huge teams of attorney reviewers tackle hundreds of thousands —
or millions — of seemingly unfiltered documents. Some industry commentators would have you believe that there
is an “us versus them” battle for supremacy between advocates of inefficient, costly manual document review and
the knight in shining armor that is technology-assisted review (TAR). The rationale for these dour predictions
about the role of human review seems predicated on an extreme hypothesis that pits computers against humans
with little consideration for practical realities. The leading LPO providers have long been proselytizers of TAR
workflows and have been constantly developing, testing, and refining these workflows to deliver smarter and less
costly review processes. The choice for corporate clients is no longer “should I employ a TAR workflow?” but
rather, “when should I employ it, and which technology and workflow best suit my needs?” Utilization of these
tools is not always even about reducing the size of the overall document corpus or finding the proverbial “smoking
gun” evidence. LPOs deploy these technologies in a variety of ways, such as to support a quality control process.
The LPO industry, being both expert- and technology-agnostic, is well placed to provide the insights their clients
need to help them choose and deploy these technologies wisely.
Contract Management and Review
LPOs do not only restrict their embrace of technology to the litigation support field. In the corporate
transactional world, the first port of call in any engagement to locate and then review and extract information from
contracts (often triggered by the implementation of a contract lifecycle management system, or following an
acquisition, or as a response to an audit) should be to determine whether technology can assist in the process.
There are tools that can be utilized to locate and collate contracts stored on hard drives, file shares, network drives,
and various software platforms. Once the contracts are found, these tools can index the files and render any text
as fully searchable using optical character recognition (OCR) technology.
After the contracts have been collected and converted to searchable text, the requisite information
important to the business needs to be extracted from each contract. While historically the process of extracting
data from volumes of contractual documentation has been a manual one, this is no longer the case. Once contracts
are made text-searchable, automated metadata extraction and categorization technology can be used to speed up
the process and reduce the costs associated with traditional manual contract review. The technology auto-triages
contracts based on certain business rules, such as the exclusion of expired, duplicate, unsigned, or immaterial
132
