How to select a paralegal?

The solicitor’s working for a client gets a boost when one delivers quality work. It depends only upon three major factors viz - Solicitors, paralegal and coordination between the two. It will not be an irony to say that a solicitor is the title page where as a paralegal draws the content of the book. This is ofcourse as per the advice and supervision of the solicitor. The sole purpose of saying this is to highlight the importance of paralegals in a law firm.

It is evidently a very important task to select a paralegal. A paralegal should posses atleast three important characteristics which can be termed as:

a. Requisite Qualification
b. Key skills
c. Cohesion & communication skill with the solicitors.

Before a paralegal is sought to be selected, one must understand their own requirement. One needs to determine the different responsibilities which are to be carried out by the paralegal and accordingly the required skills should be fixed.

Let’s say, if I am looking for a paralegal to support my work, then it is clear that I should fix the key skills matching up my specialization. Once the requisites of the paralegal are fixed, my second task would be to contact the recruitment consultants or references to shortlist the prospective paralegals. There are a couple of recruitment consultants located in UK viz –

Parkhouse Bell Ltd, Executive Stand-By, Advanced Resource Managers Ltd, Ethical Recruitment – Financial, BLT (Beaumont Leslie Thomas, Heidrick & Struggles

The recruitment consultants take the responsibility right from searching for the correct candidate to their training. One can even go to the extent of creating a checklist for the selection / appointment of the paralegals. I shall take this up in my next article.

IS LEGAL PROCESS OFFSHORING AN EXPORT OF SERVICES?

The cross borders issues generally prevail in the development of countries. This reminds me of an elderly man’s saying “The man on latch of a door control the flow of air from outside to inside & vice versa”. The import & export of goods is decided by different factors like the availability, demand and need. Country intends to export the goods looking into the fact of the ability to produce those goods & get them consumed in other International markets. The motive of export is to earn foreign exchange.

In case of offshoring the services cross border the organisation do not directly earn. However, the cost of those services in-house looks expensive which encourages its outsourcing. Offshoring can be a symbolic way of export when we consider the savings as also forming part of earning. In this services are off-shored to get the same being delivered at low prices. I am not trying to show the offshoring of jobs but the offshoring of services which technocrat offers to one’s clients.

A very simple hypothetical situation can be used to understand the balance of exchequer between two countries. Country ‘A’ exports various high profile and expensive goods to country ‘B’. In terms country ‘A’ needs to settle the balance of payment with country ‘B’ but the same always remain tilted towards country ‘A’. Country ‘B’ has got an excellent pool of people who can deliver good number of services to country ‘A’. This can be the best way to make up balance of payments as far as country ‘A’ & country ‘B’ are concern. Logically the export of goods from country ‘A’ to country ‘B’ can be matched up by export of services by country ‘B’ to country ‘A’.

Is it the way to conclude that export of services is also near to export of goods.

CAN I OFFSHORE WITHOUT REDUCING MY BILLING.

Legal Process Outsourcing (LPO) got the boom due to the cost cutting. There could be different possibilities of sharing the benefits arising out of LPO viz:-

a) The benefit completely passes to the person directly offshoring the services.
b) Sharing the benefits between the person offshoring the services & whose work is being offshore.
c) Intelligent offshoring:

The offshoring industry has been passing through turbulent times as far as Legal Process Outsourcing (LPO) is concerned. As far as offshoring of calling is concerned, there were no hindrances in its growth. The Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) could grow as the benefit of cost cutting passed only to the organization directly outsourcing the same. There were no constraints on the organization except the primary concerns.

As we talk about Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO), its growth was not many folds yet it grew. The reason of outsourcing had been the benefit of cost but constraint came from various angles like lack of growth in the said industry, difficulty in transferring & sharing knowledge based activities. The only part of the KPO industry which could develop consisted of IT offshoring which included developing, maintaining & repairing the software & hardware systems. In a way the growth of IT offshoring catalyzed the birth & growth of Legal Process Outsourcing (LPO).

It can well be understood that the offshoring of Legal & Paralegal services consists of:-

I Offshoring Paralegal Services including Legal Transcription, Filling of Forms etc.
II Offshoring Secretarial Services including maintaining relations with clients, writing letters to them, raising bills etc.
II Offshoring Projects of services like document review etc.
IV Offshoring provisional working of attorneys.
V Offshoring the monotonous part of core Legal working.

All the time the main cause of concern for the law firms & attorneys have been that the offshoring in a way reduces their own billing. The most frequent Question asked to me by attorneys & partners of the law firms from UK & US have been, “CAN I OFFSHORE WITHOUT EFFECTING MY BILLING?” My answer had been “YES.”