Legal Mosaic Essays on Legal Delivery

<strong>Legal</strong> <strong>Mosaic</strong>: <strong>Essays</strong> on <strong>Legal</strong> Delivery
Introduction
The Delivery of Corporate <strong>Legal</strong> Services: It’s a New Ballgame
The legal marketplace is undergoing a dramatic shift. The corporate
segment of the legal market- the focus of this collection of essays- was,
until recently, dominated by a relatively small number of corporate law
firms that had a stranglehold on the legal work outsourced by corporate
America. In the not so distant past, these firms typically handled all aspects
of a client matter- from high-volume/low-value to outcome determinative
tasks – and took advantage of their dominant market share to
grow into multinational, multi-million dollar enterprises, with similar
partnership models built on leverage,
With the advent of digitalization, the volume of data exploded. This
was initially a boon to large law firms that profited mightily by deploying
large phalanxes of high cost (and margin) associates to handle
document review for litigation. But the bubble finally burst and clients
began to direct this facet of outsourced work to a growing number of
legal process outsource (LPO) companies that utilized labor arbitrage
and technology to deliver it at significantly lower rates than law firms.
Disaggregation and the legal supply chain were born. And in the decade
and a half or so that has followed, more and more “legal” tasks formerly
performed by law firms are now redirected to a widening array
of legal service providers. These new entrants to legal delivery are not
constrained by the same regulatory, practice, and Bar rules as law firms
that are “engaged in the practice of law.” That means service providers
can accept institutional funding, share profits with non-lawyers, engage
in inter-disciplinary practice, and even launch IPO’s.
Service providers have come into being as a “faster, cheaper, better”
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