“Many people in UK and US have had horrible experiences dealing with Call Centers in India while calling up their banks or other service providers. Many of them would prefer not to have their line routed once again to a call center in India; that’s something different but it would be unfair to judge everything about India with that one experience” …this was a comment made by a senior executive of a London law firm in the Conference. The speaker further added “It is true that by virtue of any bad experience that people might have got from Indian call centers, many people in UK and US start judging LPOs in the wrong fashion.”
In fact I would say that people in the western countries must first reconcile to the fact that most LPOs in India employ qualified lawyers to do the off-shored legal work. These lawyers hold a proper degree in law and many of them have been practicing in Courts as well. We do not have the system of paralegals as it exists in UK or US. Here in India, you are either a qualified lawyer of a lay man as far as law is concerned.
The same speaker did make a candid confession and said that “the moment someone here comes to know that a particular piece of work has been done by an Indian attorney working in a LPO in India, they start judging the work by unfair standards.” He of course did make it clear that such is not a welcome attitude.
While meeting people in the legal circuit in London and Leeds I have more often than not encountered queries about the kind of people that Indian LPOs employ. I have taken time to explain in detail as to how the Indian legal education system works and the process in which a person is turned into a lawyer. I further suggest that anyone who gets a chance to do so must devote a part of his meeting time to make such issue clearly understood by the foreign lawyers.
I would further suggest that the off-shoring law firms should make it a point to ask for the resumes of the lawyers who are supposed to work on their project should the deal mature. There are many other ways of being assured about the quality of people that would work on the assignment rather than to just nourish assumptions and apprehensions.
Great insights Apurv. It is unfortunate how some negative experiences with Indian BPOs/Call Centers spill over to the LPO discussion before a single work assignment is even considered by the firm.
ReplyDeleteLittle by little, these perceptions will go away to a certain extent. Awareness needs to be spread.
Look forward to hearing more insights you gathered from the conference
LPO industry is in its nascent stage. The expressions "high end product" and "standard of LPO organisation and attorneys" are too early to claim.Legal process is not business process or knowledge process.Unfortunately not only in U.S, even in India, a few reputed brands in outsourcing industry has failed to recognise this norm and are treating law graduates as call centre executives or telecallers. The degree of responsibility and the kind of bent of mind LPO job requires is too different from other outsourcing industry. For the learned people present in the conferece, it is to plead that we have two reasons to be indispensible for LPO fraternity. First we share a the mother Law i.e British Common Law and being derrivatives of a common legal system, we are one of the best to interpret these laws. Secondly in India, we engage only Law graduates, exceptions are there but I can not value their work product standard. As I said in nascent stage we lack proper standards and category of work product, so every body is claiming that every body is best in their own way.
ReplyDeleteThe worst part for a legal system like us is that we are falling to this race and loosing the very objective of legal work, which is directly related to society. even the clients are not paying heed to this "objective of law" expression and consequences can be seen in the form of above gathered comments from such reputed personalities of Legal Industry. Law can not be an industry, it has never been.
Yes, the perceptions need to be changed and they are changing.
ReplyDeleteI had an opportunity to work in a lpo having an Indian team and their own in house team doing the same work simultaneously?
It was found that standard was as good if not better that their foreign counterparts.