Mindcrest plans legal outsourcing industry body

Mumbai-based Mindcrest, a legal process outsourcing (LPO) company, is in talks with other industry players to form an association of LPO companies.

The association will work towards creating standards for service quality as it prevails in the software industry. It also plans to provide standardised training procedure for lawyers who intend to join LPO companies.

The company, along with like-minded players, plans to approach Nasscom for the same. It feels such an institute or industry body will provide basic training for lawyers and familiarise them with international legal issues.

But, more importantly, will segregate serious players in this niche segment. LPO "" a part of the knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) "" is currently said to be a $30-50 million market. It is expected to grow to $5 billion by 2015. The KPO market, which is at present around $70-90 million, is expected to touch $12 billion by 2010.

Mindcrest is among the few LPO players that has restricted its operation by selecting the work it has expertise in and only hires lawyers who understand the basics of the legal discourse. The company, which has close to 250 lawyers, is planning to increase it to 450 by the end of this calendar year.

Rohan Dalal, managing director, Mindcrest, says, "Unlike the BPO industry, KPO is not about just adding numbers. It is highly skilled work that needs certain level of qualification too." With a majority of the work coming from the US and the UK, the company is looking at starting operations in Australia soon.

The company has been very focused in terms of the work that comes its way. It focuses on document review surrounding litigation, undertakes legal processes, research and drafting.

"Document review constitutes 30-35 per cent to the revenues followed by legal research and drafting, which contributes 25 per cent and 20 per cent, respectively," says Dalal.

Dalal feels that there is no point in taking work for which they do not have the required expertise. "We have been getting inquiries for drafting the US patents but we haven't taken the work as we do not have the expertise."

Rather they differentiate themselves with the others based on the work they do. "There are a lot of companies that do LPO work but they do the pure vanilla data conversion work, which we do not do. There are very few companies that are so focused," he adds.

The LPO market is still at a nascent stage in India but is growing at a rate of 30-40 per cent annually. Offshoring of such work allows a company to save anything between 50-70 per cent of their cost.