Smart legal departments work by utilizing an effective strategy that incorporates one or more legal process sourcing types. Whether it’s out-sourcing, in-sourcing, or tech-sourcing, finding the right combination that is the perfect fit for your legal department will maximize your legal and business efficiency.
Creating and using one or more sources is known as right-sourcing, and we’ll walk you through it in this article. It provides your legal department several legal and business benefits.
Right-sourcing for Legal
With right-sourcing, your legal department can maximize efficiency, by using a combination of sourcing methods that works best. Why should you consider right-sourcing your current workflows and processes? According to Lexology, right-sourcing is a “method that legal teams can use to evaluate both the company’s expectations and their resources”.
Efficient legal processes, streamlined workflows, significant cost-savings, and lightening the load on in-house teams are just a handful of the benefits that right-sourcing can provide.
Why you need legal right-sourcing
- Efficient workflows and processes
- Streamlined flow of processes
- Significant cost-savings
- Lightening the load on in-house teams
Sources to Utilize
The top 3 legal sourcing pools include outsourcing, in-sourcing, and tech-sourcing. An article by Thomson-Reuters notes that with right-sourcing, legal departments can make better business decisions by predicting the organization’s future requirements, and any risks involved. In addition, finding a winning right-sourcing strategy ensures that resources are optimized and shifted around for maximum efficiency, cost-savings, and quality.
- In-sourcing
The best pools of talent are almost always in-house. In-house counsel and attorneys can always match the guidelines and standards of their organizations. A Deloitte article defines in-sourcing as employing “permanent staff to perform tasks in-house, or using contract staff if there is a skills gap, and having them work as part of the team”.
- Outsourcing
The more popular and utilized form of legal process sourcing, outsourcing can come from outside counsel, law firms, or legal process outsourcing providers. The workload is removed off the shoulders of in-house teams but a separate budget will need to be allocated. Quality is often topnotch, but may not always match the standards of in-house teams. Generally, contract, or short-term projects are outsourced, to control quality.
- Managed services
With managed legal services, projects can be outsourced in their entirety, or in part, as required. This includes the outsourcing of legal operations, the legal department, or certain functions to legal managed service providers. As these services can be more expensive for short-term durations, it is advisable to take on longer contracts to reduce costs.
- Tech-sourcing
On-demand legal processes like e-discovery or contract/litigation reviews require legal tech tools, rather than being outsourced or in-sourced. The nature of these projects calls for specialized technology that does the work, reducing the load of in-house teams and being more effective than outside counsel.
Creating a Right-sourcing Strategy
- Identify end goal of business and legal
Your organization will need to implement a right-sourcing strategy by first assessing what the goal of a particular project is. The business and legal implications of the project need to be identified, in order to select the right sources to complete the legal projects.
- Explore sourcing options for your end goal
- Outsourcing
- In-house
- Tech-sourcing
Your team will need to evaluate which type of sourcing will assist you in achieving your legal and business goals best. It may be just one, or a combination of 2 or more. The time frames required for each sourcing type may also vary within the same project.
- Choose combination of sourcing options
In this stage, once your end goals have been identified and you have selected one or more right-sourcing types, your legal department will need to do the following:
- Allocate budgets
- Assign tasks to vendors, and track processes
- Draw up contracts or agreements before launching right-sourcing strategy
- Determine deadlines of legal processes, especially if there are several stages to pass through to reach completion
- Monitoring the entire workflow
Right-source by utilizing our legal solutions today!
