publication of the International Legal Technology Association
Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/192213
A MANAGED RISK: OUTSOURCING XXXX PRACTICE SUPPORT SERVICES manager might use the newly available hours for billable tasks. Today, a limit exists for what in-house project managers can do based on time constraints. If a team can scale up and down quickly based on its caseload, it can offer additional consultative work traditionally outsourced based on the team's overall bandwidth. Since experienced project managers and analysts are highly sought after in the market, I am not convinced the law firm would get a good return on its investment by outsourcing staff. Jackie: Some firms are interested in outsourcing their infrastructure and people to a third-party provider. What are the challenges one should consider with choosing a fully outsourced approach? What about the concern of losing legacy knowledge on existing long-term cases? Sal: As mentioned earlier, it depends on the value system of the law firm. If the law firm recognizes that the value of the services its litigation/practice support department renders is the same or better than the value of the services provided by an external service provider, then it is a no-brainer. Regardless of how the law firm deals with the costs associated with managed services, the savings can be measured in dollars, overhead, risk associated with managing client data and the burdens these place on the internal IT department. Sal: By outsourcing people, services that were internalized would be handled by staff no longer on the law firm's payroll. The first challenge is maintaining a certain level of quality and consistency in the service offering. Another challenge is the inherited knowledge one gains by working on the same client-related cases or with the same case teams that would otherwise be compromised if the staff were outsourced. You will most likely see turnover right from the start as most staff would be reluctant to stay with the absorbing company. The other such style would be to bring in new staff as part of the service offering as law firms have done in facility management solutions for their reproduction and mailroom centers. Jackie: Can a managed services model provide firms the cost savings they think it will? Jackie: Can you provide a few tangible examples of cost savings? Sal: Savings would occur in areas such as storage fees (live, offline, disaster recovery systems and backups), labor (personnel, database administrators and IT hours), maintenance and upgrades of storage fees, and maintenance and upgrades of hardware fees. Jackie: Can you predict an IT department's reaction to a decision to utilize a managed services provider to take over the infrastructure and storage needs of a practice support department? Sal: You would be surprised, as most IT departments would welcome the solution. It means one less headache for IT to manage and one less set of data to ensure are available should a disaster occur. Jackie: Would a managed services contract start at a certain point in time or would the plan include an option to offload all data being stored and hosted by the firm? Sal: I envision the plan starting on a go-forward basis at the outset and including legacy data as time and case milestones permit. It would be very difficult to move all data in one fell swoop. Prioritizing the data by most-active to least-active cases, and by data types, such as client original data versus the underlying processed data or hosted data, is the way to approach the challenge. A contract can start at any time if it speaks to the classifications of data and builds in tiers based on aged data. Jackie: Do you believe a managed services model can create an opportunity for a data remediation exercise for dormant data? Sal: Absolutely. After all, as with any data