LPO AND ETHICS

LPO and ethics have been always knitted together, for Legal Process Offshoring raises many questions on ethics. These were timely dealt with by American, European and many local bar Associations; which resulted in framing various Model rules of conduct for legal offshoring. Ethical issues range from legality of offshoring, quality of work, client confidentiality, charging clients for overhead cost in outsourcing and conflict in work done.

Only lawyers practicing in the country are bound by the Court of law, whereas offshoring meant legal information crossing borders to lawyers and non-lawyers not covered by the law. Addressing the ethical issue lawyers are needed to take full responsibility for the work outsourced, obliging to supervise the work outsourced and keeping a tab on the competence of the firm or the lawyer to whom the work is outsourced while assuring the work quality.

The quality of work done by non-lawyers in the outsourced firm is often a matter of regard, but the well-trained and skilful lawyers working in the LPO firms supervise and ensure quality content.

A lawyer is restricted to pass client confidences or secrets to a third party and it would require the client’s consent to do so, however the clients in many cases are reluctant to allow lawyers to share their confidential information to firms abroad. The overseas LPO Company is bound to see that the client data remains confidential in every stage. The facilities maintained by the LPO vendor for ensuring it become a very important factor in this regard.

Bar Associations has at all times voiced against over-charging clients in the pretext of offshoring. The associations argue to incorporate the offshoring expenditure in their normal fee structure to the clients. Conflict of work is a simple but notable thing to be ensured by the lawyer. A conflict checking mechanism should be maintained by the lawyer to check that no conflict arises in the work done by the outsourced firm that could be adverse to the interests of the client.

Ethics in LPO is both static and dynamic in nature, with a one time static assessment of capability and credibility of the LPO firm, and a routine dynamic process of evaluations of assigned job. Ethical issues are not to be addressed as hindrances to legal offshoring but a moral conduct that has to be maintained in the process of offshoring legal processes.