Legal Services as Commodity: Reinventing the Lawyers' Services

Dusan Jovanovic

A chapter in Positive and Negative Aspects of Outsourcing from IntechOpen

Abstract: Business service is a very broad, highly fragmented, highly labor-intensive, and capital-adverse industry that provides nonfinancial business-related services to other firms. Due to the broad nature of the industry, the definition of business service includes various services. Recently, powerful forces have reshaped the market for legal advice delivered to corporations. The "new normal" is characterized by a higher price pressure (clients demanding another megatrend, transforming workflows and business models. The volume of data used in legal advice has increased exponentially--a pattern seen in many other industries as well. Legal industry (as a part of business services) has experienced a global paradigm shift in the delivery model for legal services, known as legal process outsourcing, which transfers the work of attorneys, paralegals, and other legal professionals to external vendors located domestically and overseas. Legal outsourcing (both onshore and offshore) is transforming more for less) the deconstruction of formerly homogeneous legal services into different activities and the rise of legal process outsourcing. The digitization of legal data constitutes law practice as law firms and corporate legal departments seek to minimize costs, increase flexibility, and expand their in-house capabilities. With the emergence of legal services outsourcing, the future generation will lead a more sophisticated life, with a higher value of legal work, at a higher level of quality and speed, and dramatically at a lower cost. In this chapter, the author deals with the process of the transformation of legal service into a legal product and points to some dilemmas during that process. This chapter argues that outsourcing ultimately will have a positive effect on the legal profession and development of the quality of legal services. In the second part of this chapter, the author also stresses out some information about different possibilities, how to organize virtual law firms (with legal tech) for low-budget legal services into the Slovenian case.

Keywords: LPO (legal process outsourcing); LSO (legal service outsourcing); virtual law firms; new business model; legal tech; corporate secretary; corporate governance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: M10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ito:pchaps:135972

DOI: 10.5772/intechopen.74799

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