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ARCHIVED CONTENT
You are viewing ARCHIVED CONTENT released online between 1 April 2010 and 24 August 2018 or content that has been selectively archived and is no longer active. Content in this archive is NOT UPDATED, and links may not function.Extract from article by Jordan Furlong
The steady rise of the ALSP since the year 2000 — the legal process outsourcer, the flex-lawyer platform, the managed legal services company, and advanced legal software — has enabled the movement of millions of hours’ worth of routine, straightforward legal work off lawyers’ desks and out of law firms. That work has migrated into both ALSPs and law departments themselves, where it is performed faster, less expensively, and often to a higher degree of quality and reliability. The cost savings cannot be underestimated: Ray Bayley, founder of Novus Law, famously observed that for every dollar his company makes, law firms lose four. It’s not just that this routine work left law firms — it’s that it was streamlined, structured, and shrunken on the way to its new home.
This result is a testament to the fact that law firms were carrying out mind-boggling amounts of legal work inefficiently, haphazardly, and wastefully. It was work that didn’t really belong in law firms anymore and that is no longer part of many firms’ inventory (as unemployed would-be associates and poorly leveraged partners can both ruefully attest). Twenty years after it first emerged, the ALSP sector no longer has to prove itself. Disintermediation of routine work from law firms has been a success.
Read the complete article at The end of the beginning
Additional Reading:
- Too Many Law Firms Are Still Fighting the Last War: “2018 Report on the State of the Legal Market”
- The E-Discovery Market May Not Be Consolidating As Fast As Everyone Thinks