Archive for the 'India' Category
Trinton venture in KPO and LPO
Filed under: India, Legal Process Outsourcing | Tags: Legal Process Outsourcing, outsourcing, lpo, outsourcing news, Knowledge Process Outsourcing, venture
Comments(0) Trinton Corp. Limited, a Noida-based telemarketing company, is planning a venture in the KPO / LPO market because of the lucrative margins which have become a ‘distant dream‘ in the call center business. The Trinton Corp. website mentions that the business focusing on ‘BPO, KPO, Enterprise Solution and LPO.’
The company would be providing outsourcing services in the legal space, which includes legal transcription, prescription, intellectual property, and patents. The Company’s Managing Director, Mr. KC Gupta said in a public statement:
We are moving onto a higher value chain. The LPO (legal process outsourcing) business pays far more than the vanilla call centre business, as it is a highly specialised job.
Trinton would be allocating over 50 seats from its Gurgaon call-centre to the KPO. The UK-centric business is inclined to generate half of its business revenues from the KPO over due course of time. It targets to achieve 20% of revenues form the business by the next fiscal.
Gupta said that the company was in the final stages of negotiations with a few legal clients and expects a deal to be completed within the next six months. He also said that the KPO business would be “operational from March-April 2009 onwards.”
The company aims to increase its current workforce from existing 950 to 1,300 employees by April 2009. They will be hiring chartered accountants, lawyers and company secretaries to plug them into the KPO domain.
The company is expected to post revenue of Rs 160 crore for FY07-08, which will be announced in couple of weeks.
Links: Legal Process Outsourcing
Filed under: India, Legal Process Outsourcing, Links | Tags: legal outsourcing, Legal Process Outsourcing, Links, lpo, outsourcing
Comments(1) Links that make for a great reading.
Lawyer salaries skyrocket in India as foreign firms poach talent
Filed under: India, Labour, Legal Process Outsourcing | Tags: law in india, law students, lawyers in india, legal industry, legal industry in india, Legal Process Outsourcing, lpo, salary hike
Comments(0) A full-blown war has erupted in the Indian legal industry with the entry of the foreign firms seeking talent in the labor market.
Firms like Clifford Chance and Allen & Overy are aggressively recruiting talent and salaries have substantially increased across the cities of India. This has pushed large domestic law firms to increase pay-outs in form of significant salary hikes some going up to even 100%. Law firms that are not giving out ad hoc increment immediately are giving year end bonuses and promotions. Current regulations do not allow foreign firms to open offices in India, but that does not stop them from recruiting attorneys for their foreign law offices.
It also appears that this is going to be the state of affairs for the times to come. A large percentage of policy and decision-makers in India are law graduates, and the advocate lobby is very strong in India. Forbes.com published an article by Mr. Cyril Shroff, one of the partners at Amarchand Mangaldas, a strong voice against Liberalization.
The Bar Council of India recently removed the restrictions placed on lawyers against advertisements, in a recent announcement. The BCI, constituted under the Advocates Act of 1961, to regulate the nature of legal practice in India and the state bar councils have passed a resolution on January 28, 2008, agreeing to amend the Rules of Professional Conduct and Ethics to enable lawyers to disseminate information on their qualifications, areas of specialisation, standing and skills only through websites.
Geetnath Ganguly, the executive chairman of the State Legal Aids Services, West Bengal, expressed:
I think this move was much needed to keep pace with global changes, the changing nature of legal services and the legal process outsourcing business. In today’s context, global exposure is mandatory and if lawyers can advertise their legal proficiency through websites, their prospects will only be enhanced.
What does this spell for the Legal Process Outsourcing Industry? Fresh law graduates can expect salary hikes in the face of an overall increase of wages in the industry. However, the caveat is that change in the industry might end up hurting the small and medium-size segment of the industry, as they might not be able to keep up.
Says Rohan Dalal, managing director of Mindcrest:
In our industry, entry-level salaries have risen by over 50 per cent over the last two years. Though it is a challenge to maintain profitability given the steep rise in wages, we are also getting better rates from our clients.
US Recession ramifications on the LPO industry
Filed under: India, Legal Process Outsourcing, US Recession | Tags: Asia, India, Legal Process Outsourcing, Legal Services Outsourcing, lpo, outsourcing, US Recession
Comments(0) 
Image credit: wallyg on flickr; CC BY-NC-ND
On his blog, Rahul Jindal posts an excerpt from an interview with the SDD Global Chairman Russel Smith.
No one likes a recession, but for quality legal outsourcing providers, it will mean more business, not less. I just got back from a two-month marketing tour of the U.S. and Europe, and one in-house corporate counsel after another told me of the increasing pressure to cut legal budgets. For many, that will mean outsourcing. Recessions and depressions generally don’t reduce the need for legal work, but they do reduce the tolerance for high legal fees. Also, not all industries suffer during downturns. Many of our clients are media and entertainment companies, and that’s a field that’s almost recession-proof. When times are tough, and people don’t have jobs, the demand for movies and television programming often goes up, not down. It’s partly escapism, but also an increase in free time.
This is an interesting observation. Allaying the fears of a global recession, Mr. Smith blithely dispels the myth of a fast-decoupling US economy.
The whole world watches as the titans clash in the primaries of the US elections. Most of us who have been following the elections know well enough that this year, the primaries would be the most significant part of the election process. The Democrats are in control of the US Congress, a Democratic victory in the presidential elections seems imminent, and the Outsourcing industry is in for a radical overhaul.
Legal Process Outsourcing: Addressing Security Concerns
Filed under: India, Legal Process Outsourcing, Security | Tags: India, Legal Process Outsourcing, offshoring concerns, security concerns, service provider relationship
Comments(2) By Stefan Belinfanti
A major concern for law firms that are considering whether or not to take the legal process outsourcing (LPO) plunge is that of data protection. Client confidentiality is so rooted in the legal culture, and is such a fundamental aspect of professional legal ethics, that the mere notion of a pair of eyes glimpsing data from across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans sends shivers up the spines of many lawyers. Yet the ironic part is that there is a group of entities whose obsession with security issues may make that of attorneys seem a trivial thing – the outsourcing companies themselves. The building and maintaining of relationships with current and future clients is the lifeblood for service providers.
As outsourcing becomes more widespread and competition in the marketplace grows, the ability to illustrate the existence (and continued use) of powerful safeguards will increasingly become one of the significant factors for companies that are deciding which provider to link up with. Consequently, the leading outsourcing companies take security concerns extremely seriously, which may explain why many domestic studies have shown that the outsourcing process is no less secure, and may in fact be even more secure, than having the same services performed in-house.
Process fidelity is definitely necessary in the legal arena, but this needs to be placed in perspective. While legal documentation does sometimes consist of sensitive information, the sensitivity often stems from the defining characteristics of litigation and practice procedures. Law firms are no different from other companies in that they do not like to have their business practices broadcasted to the general public. However, concerning the type of damage that can be caused by leaking of information, legal data is in general substantially less sensitive than other types of data that have been outsourced for years on a massive scale. When the fact that large banks, financial institutions, and even the IRS are outsourcing on an extended basis, the entire issue of data protection insofar as LPO is concerned is put into clearer perspective. Suddenly, summons and complaints and discovery materials take on a whole new light when attorneys digest the fact that extensive credit histories, records of financial transactions and tax forms are being processed by the millions overseas.
Why outsource to India?
Filed under: India, Legal Process Outsourcing | Tags: Asia, India, Legal Process Outsourcing, lpo
Comments(0) Fresh American graduates are being paid increasingly high remuneration in the past four years. The costs of consulting senior legal professionals have spiral-headed and touched $ 1500 an hour. Clients are constantly pushing law firms in the United States to send basic legal tasks to India where they enjoy a conspicuous labor arbitrage benefit. English-speaking and skilled lawyers, comfortable with the common-law doctrines, are working round the clock in Legal Process Outsourcing Centers across the country at $ 20 an hour.
The firms are reacting to a phenomenon which will move about 50000 legal jobs overseas by 2015, according to Boston based Forrester Research Inc.
Says Robert Profusek, co-head of the mergers and acquisitions practice at Jones Day in New York:
“The objective is to have only the most valuable people in London or New York, and the others in India, China or Columbus, Ohio,”
Companies with in-house legal departments in India include Wilmington, Delaware-based DuPont Co., San Jose, California-based Cisco Systems Inc., and New York-based Morgan Stanley, according to ValueNotes Database Pvt. The Indian legal services industry will more than quadruple to $640 million by 2010 from $146 million in 2006, Maharashtra, India-based ValueNotes said.
“General Electric sends about $ 3 million a year in routine legal work to its Indian affiliate”
“India has very talented lawyers, but it’s a misconception that you can just send work there and it gets done. You need proper supervision and security.”
Says Janine Dascenzo, the Fairfield, Connecticut-based company’s managing counsel for legal operations.
It is often that clients are pushing firms like Kirkland and Ellis, the seventh-largest law firm in the United States to offshore labor-intensive tasks.
“I’m not an advocate of offshoring legal services, but having worked in this area for so long, I understand the value of the model”
“Typically, clients hire a provider and Chicago-based Kirkland helps manage the attorneys”
Says Gregg Kirchhoefer, a senior partner in the firm’s outsourcing and technology transaction practice.
Source: bloomberg.com
