Legal process outsourcing does not cut your review hours
Production got cheaper. The read did not, and it cannot be bought.
A vendor can price every step of a document review except the last one. That step is yours, and it is not for sale. Legal process outsourcing lowers the cost of producing work and leaves the cost of reviewing it exactly where it was. Production is variable. A licensed attorney's hours are not, and there are the same number of them this month as there were last. So the contract adds pages and the week does not get longer. Capacity is both halves of that. You can only buy one.
What legal process outsourcing actually moves off your desk
First-pass review, indexing, chronologies, deposition summaries, intake write-ups, document assembly. Every one of those can leave the building and come back finished. Legal process outsourcing moves production, and production is the whole of it. A vendor will quote the work by the page, by the hour or by the seat, and all three quotes are honest. What does not leave is the read.
A vendor is a variable cost, and that is the entire appeal. I understand the appeal. Variable cost only becomes filed work by passing through a fixed one. The fixed one is a person in your building with a bar card. That person's calendar was full in March. Every page produced offshore lands in it. Hand a backlog out in bulk and it comes back as a stack. A stack is not progress. Just relocated.
Volume arrives. Capacity clears.
Why your weekly review hours are the ceiling, not the vendor's rate
I want the reviewer's free hours next week before I want anybody's rate. That number is the ceiling: hours a licensed attorney can spend reading work that is not their own. It is small. It is spoken for already, and almost no firm has ever written it down.
Run the ratio. One reviewer and four producers means the fourth person's output waits, and waiting work is indistinguishable from work nobody did. That is where the wheels fall off. A rate does not touch it. A cheaper producer does not create an hour in anybody's Tuesday.
The firms that scale well add review capacity before they add producers. The ones that struggled hired four people and kept one reviewer. One paralegal absorbs a backlog. Four paralegals change what the firm can take on, and only if somebody reads them. The vendor was never the constraint. I would fund the reviewer's week before I funded a fourth producer.
The last read is not a task a vendor can take
The ABA Model Rules are where the line between legal judgment and unauthorized practice of law is set out. No outsourcing contract moves that line. The last read is not a workflow step. It is legal judgment, and it stays with a licensed lawyer however the file was produced.
Geography is not the issue. A paralegal in Columbus and a paralegal in Cebu sit on the same side of that line. The boundary is drawn by legal judgment and supervision, not by where the hire sits. A vendor with better onboarding does not move it an inch. Neither does a tool that drafts faster than a person. So this one is structural rather than commercial. The input you are short of is the one nobody is allowed to sell you.
Nobody has ever outsourced the signature.
Firms that judge the deal on the vendor's rate are not being lazy
A rate is checkable in one line of a proposal. Review hours appear nowhere in the firm's records. The only person who could estimate them is the person with no time to do the estimate. A managing partner burned by a vendor once is right to weight the number that can be verified.
But the rate is a fact about production, and production was never the scarce part. The invoice is the only thing on the record, and what it records is production. Read the two lines apart. Cost per produced page fell. Hours available to approve a produced page did not move by a minute.
A cheaper input into a full queue is not a saving. Just a longer queue at a better price.
How to tell whether you bought capacity or volume
Both look the same for about six weeks. Volume shows up as work in progress, a full pipeline and a vendor with excellent attendance. Capacity shows up as files closing. The test is arithmetic and it belongs before the scope is signed, not after the first invoice. Name the attorney who will read the output. Count the hours that person has for it next week, not in an average week. Then multiply by what those hours actually clear. That product is your scope. If the proposed throughput is triple it, the arrangement is commissioning a backlog and billing by the page. Most firms write the scope as a task list and never write down who reads the output. I do not think a proposal is finished until that number is on it. Then the first month lands, and the reviewer is the cost nobody priced.
Buy the review hour first. Everything else is procurement.
People also ask about this
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