In the last decade, we saw the emergence of small but very focused and niche players in the legal services outsourcing space. These were largely companies based in India, working for in-house corporate counsel or law firms. However, in the last three to four years, we have seen the emergence of large IT services and BPO companies enter this segment as well. What makes one of the most successful IT and BPO company foray into the legal services outsourcing segment? Infosys BPO clocked revenues of $352.1 million in FY10, about 6% of the total company revenues. Infosys BPO has quickly made a foray into the knowledge services segment as well. Their entry into the legal services outsourcing segment, though surprising to many, has taken off to a successful start in the last two to three years.

Having a large number of clients across North America, Europe and the Asia Pacific regions has helped Infosys venture into the legal services outsourcing space. In fact, we at ValueNotes feel that this approach of targeting existing clients for new ventures is also being employed by many other IT services and BPO companies. Pure play BPO companies, such as WNS have also ventured into the legal services outsourcing segment. Having spoken to both the pure play vendors and the IT/BPO companies in this space, we find that though the offerings are similar, approaches are different. The IT/BPO players are able to offer the scale, ability to attract talent and hence best of breed domain competency, and the technology and related competencies, while the pure play vendors continue as domain experts.

ValueNotes interviewed Rahul Shah, who heads the legal services outsourcing practice in Infosys BPO to get his perspectives on the growth opportunities he sees in this segment and Infosys’ efforts to gain market share.

Currently, Infosys offers the following legal outsourcing services:

•   Contract services including contract drafting, review and assessment, consulting around contract processes and benchmarking against best practices and ICAP, a hosted contract management platform that is provided on a “pay-as-you-go” model
•   End-to-end e-discovery services including litigation readiness assessment, early case assessment and ESI processing and document review from onshore as well as offshore
•   Intellectual property services including consulting & outsourcing
•   Legal publishing and research
•   Risk assessment
•   Obligation tracking
•   Regulatory compliance

ValueNotes: After overcoming the initial challenges dealing with outsourcing, what new challenges have you begun to face? What steps have been taken to overcome these problems?

Infosys: In the LPO space, we have found that our services were received well, thereby enabling us to strongly ramp up in the last 2.5 years to 500+ resources, including 200+ lawyers. We have found great synergies with the Infosys corporate clients.

However, we did face numerous challenges in introducing legal services outsourcing as an offering within the Infosys ecosystem. Firstly, with LPO being a new service line, we focused on strategies to leverage the large Infosys field force in order to communicate the right messages to our clients. We ran multiple field communication and internal marketing campaigns.

Secondly, since most of our clients are from the IT sector; our relationships are therefore with the CIO in the organization or at the CXO levels. Our challenge was to leverage those relationships to acquire legal business. Towards this, we created integrated solutions for the General Counsel’s office including technology, consulting and legal outsourcing services.

Thirdly, Infosys did not have a very strong presence in the ‘Law firm’ sector. Infosys LPO is changing that with our offering around ‘Law office of the future’ and is confident that we will generate significant board level connects through the law firms and General Counsel’s office for Infosys as an organization.

Last but not the least, our expansion has also necessitated focusing on people and their ability to provide customer delight and a consistent customer experience. Towards this, we have introduced “LPO Academy”. LPO academy provides training and certification to all Infosys LPO employees in areas such as legal domain, soft skills and client management to ensure consistent experience for our clients across the board.

Infosys: Law firms are an important element in the eco-system and have not been a sector where we have traditionally had many IT or BPO clients. As a result we have brought together the different units of Infosys, IT-BPO-LPO-KPO, to create an integrated proposition for Law firms – ‘Law office of the future’.

In the e-discovery service offering, we have created an end to end proposition thereby going beyond the traditional mandate of document review and looking at the entire value chain of ‘data generation to data consumption’ for litigation. Infosys focuses and delivers significant transformation, in comparison to traditional 'document review services' offered by the LPO industry, where the cost arbitrage is the main play. Infosys achieves this through the way clients collect, retain, process and dispose data. The company also provides consulting services around assessing litigation readiness, provides technology support for forensic collection, early case assessment, ESI processing, in addition to document review. The boundaries of technology and manual review in e-discovery are constantly moving in favor of technology, and Infosys is driving the change.    

ValueNotes: Has there been a demand for the expansion to onshore locations?

Infosys: With the growth of our business, a multi-locational presence has been necessary, leading to expansion plans in centers like Chennai, Manila and onshore capabilities in the US.

ValueNotes: What new strategies, if any, are being used to maintain healthy client relationships whilst attracting new clients?

Infosys: We are continuing to focus on delivery excellence. We also continue to create additional value through transformation.

We offer process re-engineering and automation to improve productivity, knowledge management etc. We have at our disposal more than a 100 tools that we can apply to client engagements to improve their customer experience and business performance.

Apart from the technology that we offer for improved client experience, we also provide onsite experts to provide focused attention to clients.

The word “Transformation” sums it all for us. Providing high quality output to the clients is a hygiene factor.  To achieve client delight, it is important for us to achieve transformation in the work that we are contracted to complete. For example, if we are outsourcing legal research for a client we look to leverage the following levers to achieve transformation. This involves:

•    Categorization of research requirements into different buckets
•    Collecting metrics to enable better estimation and hence better predictability of delivery timelines
•    Automation to improve productivity and turn-around-time
•    Capabilities around automatic refresh and updates of the research
•    Knowledge management capabilities for the research on which our clients are spending their dollars.

There are certain requirements to achieve transformation. A well trained workforce & a strong governance process to ensure that we are listening to the customers continuously are a couple of them. This strengthens client relationships and builds strong client advocacy that in turn can help us attract newer clients.

ValueNotes: What are the services / sub-services that current and future clients are looking to outsource?

Infosys:     
•    Consulting
     o    How can I improve my contracting / IP / Litigation / Research process?
     o    Litigation Readiness Assessment
     o    How to improve knowledge management?
•    Business enabling services
     o    F&A
     o    HR
     o    Customer data management
     o    Matter / Case management
•    Technology
     o    Product selection and implementation
     o    Cloud based applications for contract management, IP or Innovation lifecycle management and for legal research
•    KPO Services
     o    Competitive Research
     o    Market intelligence

ValueNotes: What determinants are compulsory for growth in the legal process outsourcing scene for the next 5 years? What additional factors do you see coming into play with time?

Infosys: In the next five years, ability to grow and deliver from multiple locations will be key to success. Business Transformation capabilities that would encompass assessing clients’ pain points and thereafter providing an integrated domain, process and technology solution to them will be extremely important. We are able to build trust with the clients with our sound values and credentials and also add value due to our synergies with other offerings. Therefore, the focus is not just on labor arbitrage but also on providing transformation capabilities from different geographies, leveraging best in class people with complete trust and confidence from our clients who take comfort in the fact that they are getting the best value for money.

ValueNotes: Will competition from the Philippines, Australia and various other foreign destinations force Indian vendors to develop new approaches to remain competitive?

Infosys: Competition always forces new strategies and approaches; this is true of any market. We feel that India will have an edge due to its large pool of lawyers and long history of providing multiple services to their clients.

ValueNotes: How do you see the legal process outsourcing model evolving? What would you consider the advantages or disadvantages of this evolution?

Infosys: Law firms are here to stay; LPOs will never replace them. However, organizations such as Infosys will become integral partners to law firms to provide additional value to corporate clients. Law firms will not grow in terms of FTEs but will grow in revenues instead owing to an increase in revenue productivity on fixed price contracts; improvement in efficiencies and knowledge management as well as better adoption of technology.

General Counsel will move towards multi-service shared centers providing multiple legal and related technologies & consulting services. The industry will see a three way model between them; law firms and firms similar to Infosys to deliver value.

Infosys as well as other firms will become innovation hubs and provide for better process innovations. 

 
About Mr. Rahul Shah:

 

Rahul Shah, AVP, has over 16 years of outsourcing, consulting and business management experience across a wide variety of domains including energy and commodity trading and risk management, knowledge services outsourcing, LPO and financial planning & analysis outsourcing. He currently heads the LPO Practice for Infosys.