Junior lawyers to benefit from outsourcing, says partner

Junior lawyers will have more opportunities to undertake high level legal work through the use of legal outsource providers such as CPA Global, according to a top tier partner. “I think it is very naive to think that lawyers can’t learn unless they are snowed under with repetitive, low level legal work,” said partner at Blake Dawson, Tony Denholder during a presentation at last week’s Australian Corporate Lawyers Association (ACLA) conference. “Instead, junior lawyers will be able to delegate low level, repetitious legal work to outsource providers such as CPA and focus instead on the practice of law. It also works out cheaper for the client, because instead of a junior lawyer doing that work, a dedicated professional is doing it.”

CPA Global strategy director for legal service outsourcing and former Rio Tinto general counsel Leah Cooper said a number of law firms and their clients were seeing the advantage of legal outsourcing. “By outsourcing low level legal work you are also freeing up internal legal talent for more complex legal work,” she said. “We are not trying to replace lawyers; we are trying to help lawyers do legal work,” she added.

CPA Global has two offices in India where legal work, including patent searches, document review, transaction support, contractual solutions and legal research is undertaken for clients around the world, including Blake Dawson’s client Rio Tinto. “There was a lot of work across all practice areas where there were tasks we thought we could have been completed by CPA Global more efficiently,” said Denholder.

A number of CPA Global staff are trained lawyers who specialise in a particular area of work, making them more efficient, according to Cooper. “Our staff focus on one area and are able to work at higher levels of productivity, because it’s all they do... our staff are not as distracted as lawyers,” she said. Even though the staff at CPA Global have legal training, they are not practicing lawyers, making it a cheaper option for clients. “In legal research we don’t provide the conclusion, that’s the legal firm’s job, we provide the research, the analysis, the examples,” said Cooper.

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