Until recently, law firms had always followed a traditional business model about how a law firm operated. Within the past few years, there has been an emergence of alternative legal service providers focused on specialties, allowing legal firms to outsource. The shift has been beneficial overall, but it's not without its frustrations. Some legal outsourcing alternative providers share their experiences and insights with the solutions that resolved conflicts.
External counsel company Lexoo’s co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Daniel van Binsbergen said in-house teams complain frequently about mismatched legal services in regards to on-demand lawyer services. An example is a first draft document being too aggressive and therefore would instantly get rejected by the counterparty, having to either go back to the lawyer for a second draft with compensation or fix the document.
Other issues occur when work wasn't properly scoped out and unexpected bills cause costs to become out of control. A way to combat that possibility is for a firm's method of scoping out jobs to continually be tweaked and include that tweaking as part of the process itself.
“Philosophically where some firms go wrong is they feel expertise is enough, so they have a great focus on getting the right people on board, but they haven’t really layered in process or technology to make sure it works,” van Binsbergen said. “What we’ve done is create a service where we combine that expertise but with the process and technology to go with it.”
David Pierce, senior vice president and head of global sales at Axiom, says the firm’s offering is not only aiming to improve the way legal services are delivered but also to help improve both the career opportunities for lawyers and the way law is practiced.
“We’re always thinking about how we can make it easier for lawyers to connect to opportunities that might be interesting to them, and to take the next steps in their career to advance and build skills, all while making it easier for clients to have a real-time beat on our legal talent and have access to the right resources at the right time," Pierce said.
Keystone Law, a U.K.-based firm, is also all about innovation with its alternative career paths that offer flexible, remote legal work without the constraints of traditional law firm settings.
“We have liberated our lawyers to practice law and freed them from office politics, billing quotas, and other stressors which come with the traditional partnership structure,” Maurice Tunney, director of technology and innovation at Keystone, said.
"We are, as I mentioned, kind of building on with some very specific kind of aspects of the record retrieval process. As I mentioned, we're working very closely with an organization right now, to get it a little bit more involved in the very front end of the process of record retrieval, as a full-service offering," James Reynolds, vice president of Client Services at Peak Outsourcing, said about Peak's innovations in the legal outsourcing industry.