Know this before a legal process outsourcing hire quits
Three things the vendor never touches: ramp, review hours, the signature.
Legal process outsourcing adds no capacity on its own. It adds output. Output is not the same thing. Work is finished when a licensed attorney has read it and put their name near it. A vendor changes what an hour of production costs. Attorney review hours per week are the ceiling. No rate card moves them. So buy it. Just buy it with the second number written down next to the first.
What legal process outsourcing actually changes
Legal process outsourcing changes one line on the sheet. What a draft costs to produce. Everything downstream of that draft costs what it cost last year. A vendor is variable cost. You buy more of it in a heavy month and less in a light one. Attorney review time is fixed. It is fixed by the hours a licensed person has left after their own docket. That number does not rise because production got cheaper. Variable cost only becomes finished work by passing through a fixed one.
Most firms price the engagement per memo. Then they budget nothing for the partner who has to read the memo. The proposal looks like a saving because the second number never appears on it. Put three researchers behind one reviewer and the reviewer is now the whole firm. Output climbs in week two. Finished work climbs never. A firm that will not add review capacity is buying volume rather than capacity, whatever the contract is called.
That is not capacity. That is a queue.
A 12-hour offset is a shift pattern, not a lag
The standard objection to offshore research is the clock. It is not a stupid one. You send a question at four in the afternoon. The answer arrives while you are asleep. Ask one follow-up and you have spent a day on two sentences. Nearshore gives you four hours of overlap and a phone somebody picks up. A partner who has lost a Wednesday to a clarifying email is right to want that.
The same offset is what people praise when they call it an overnight desk. Twelve hours is a wall or a second shift. The brief decides which. A specified task travels. Pull the authority, note the splits, flag anything cutting against our position. A vague one does not. See what you can find on this comes back twelve hours later as the wrong thing. Now you have lost the day you were worried about losing. The offset punishes conversation and rewards specification. That is a fact about your instructions, not about the map.
Write the brief.
Supervision does not travel with the work
The duty stays in your building. A memo drafted by a non-US-licensed researcher in the Philippines is an input. So is one drafted by a first-year down the hall. The signature on the filing is yours either way. Nobody has to reason this out from first principles. Outsourcing legal and nonlegal support services has already been addressed in a formal ethics opinion, and it is worth reading before the scope is written. What your own state has adopted is a question for your own counsel and not for a blog.
Where it bites is the shape of the work you send out. A researcher admitted nowhere in the US produces research, not conclusions. Ask whether the claim is time-barred and you have asked for a judgment from someone who cannot give one. Ask for the statute, the tolling authority and the docket dates in a table. Now you have something you can check in twenty minutes. Same person. Same rate. The difference is the request. Offshore research does not lower your exposure. It lowers the cost of the first draft you were always going to read.
The saving is real. The risk never moved an inch.
What happens when the researcher leaves mid-matter
This is the failure nobody prices, and it is the one I see coming first. A single contractor holds the matter's history in their own head and on their own drive. They take another job. The firm owns a half-finished research file it cannot reconstruct. The vendor's answer is a fresh resume in three weeks. Nothing about that file is on the record anywhere the firm can reach.
Two structural things decide how bad that gets. The first is where the work lived. A shared repository means the replacement reads the file. A personal drive means the replacement starts over. The second is who employed the person. Enforcement needs a party in the same jurisdiction as the person doing the work. A US firm chasing an individual contractor overseas is chasing nothing. An employer of record in that country is a party you can reach. A freelancer with a signed PDF is a document. Continuity terms demand reading before rate negotiation. Most firms skip this step.
Check the repository.
How should a legal research engagement be priced?
Every model on the table prices the same thing. Hourly prices attention. Per-project prices a deliverable. A retainer prices availability. A subscription prices access to a bench. All four price production. None of them price the two lines that decide whether any of it works. Ramp and review.
Ramp is a cost, not a courtesy period. Someone is learning your citation preferences, your practice area's quirks and your partners' tolerance for hedging. That work gets read twice. The second read is spent in the most expensive hours the firm owns. Put it in the first invoice rather than discovering it in month two. Review belongs in the same spreadsheet as the rate: hours per week, by name, agreed before anyone signs. Then make the first engagement one you can grade. Send a closed batch first, because you already know what the correct output looks like. A live matter teaches you nothing about a vendor and costs you a deadline. Price the review hours first. The rate can wait.
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