Legal Process Outsourcing in India –Knowledge Intensive work driving growth

Initially LPO in India was transcription but now Indian LPO vendors offer end to end solutions in legal domain. India is commonly preferred destination for LPO and hold around 85 percent of the market share, with advantages like cost savings, similarity in legal systems of both the US and UK legal system, availability of 1.8 million lawyers as skilled manpower with English proficiency and ‘time factor’ which is time zone advantage.  LPO services go beyond simple cost-cutting and focus more on the quality of services like Litigation and business document review, contract management, electronic discovery, legal analytics and document preparation etc. LPO industry is expected to grow in the next five years with revenue growth of 26% annually. For charts please click here - ValueNotes and Evalueserveestimates charts.

According to The LPO Program, the Global LPO market is expected to grow 34% ($217m) in 2011, from a base of $640m in 2010, to $857m. The Forrester report estimates the global market for legal services to be $250 billion with the US accounting for more than two-thirds of the market, the vast majority of which comes from U.S. companies and law firms ($170 billion). According to NASSCOM-CRISIL study, LPO in India was USD 356.5 million in FY2010 and is expected to record robust growth to a USD 1.3 billion market by 2015. For more estimates please click here – LPO IndustryEstimates.

Indian LPO space is controlled by exclusive LPO service providers such as Pangea3, CPA Global, Unitedlex, Integreon and Evalueserve which are large players with 500 lawyers. Infosys LPO engagements account for 60 per cent of the total KPO business, with over 500 professionals and Rs. 70 crore ($15 million) in annual revenue. Wipro Technologies provide legal process outsourcing (LPO) to Microsoft’s intellectual property (IP) and licensing group worldwide. HCL Technologies is another major player and it has been doing well in LPO since last 4 years. TCS does not have a major presence in the LPO segment but is planning to explore the Legal Process Outsourcing (LPO) market. Cognizant debuted in the LPO space just two years ago initially by reviewing contracts for our financial services clients.

With demand for LPO on rise, bigger players will enter into market and the outsourcing of specialized high-end legal outsourcing and variety of legal work outsourced in large amounts will definitely attract new players into the market.

For detailed article please click here -  India Legal Process Outsourcing 2011 Key playersand growth forecast