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Legal Vendor Management Services

Legal vendors - or ancillary (non-attorney) services represent a significant and growing cost for most corporate legal departments. Traditionally in-house counsel has relied on outside counsel to select and manage these legal vendor and ancillary service providers. Since these costs are often treated as “pass-through”, outside counsel typically has little direct incentive to manage them optimally. This area represents an important opportunity to increase transparency, improve quality, and significantly reduce costs.

Vendor CATEGORIES / TYPES

In the past Argopoint has achieved in excess of 20% savings in Ancillary Services including, but not limited to, the following:

Alternative Legal Service Providers (ALSPs)

ALSPs, also called enterprise legal services providers perform many of the tasks traditionally done by law firms. They are particularly cost effective for high volume, repetitive tasks, not bet-the-company events. Law companies’ most frequently performed tasks are:

• Litigation and investigation suport

• Legal research

• Document review and coding

• E-discovery/e-disclosure

• Regulatory risk and compliance

Legal Process Outsourcing (LPO) entities

legal outsourcing aka legal process outsourcing is business process outsourcing applied to legal services. It goes further than law companies in terms of automation and handling of high volume work. Read more on LPO here. Some frequently performed tasks are:

• agency work

• document review

• legal research and writing

• drafting of pleadings and brieds

• patent services

Legal Technology Providers

Legal technology is growing in capabilities, potential, effectiveness and complexity by the day. For an up-to-date consultation on what legal tech is doing and how it could apply to you, contact us. But generally speaking, legal technology providers are aiming to expand into the territory that was traditionally that of ALSP and LPO providers, with GenAI taking on chunks of legal work via “bots” or “operators” that do a lot of first-line review, document analysis, answer basic legal questions, and otherwise take work off the plate of attorneys and legal staff. Some of the tasks that technology is fairly well established at are:

• eDisclosure and AI document analysis

• Case and workflow management

• Practice & dossier management

• Document management & capture

• Document & contract automation

• Legal research

• Contract management

• Legal work intake / triage

Court Reporting

Court reporting and deposition services create an important opportunity to develop procurement and provider selection  strategy through the creation of a comprehensive strategy. Companies with mass torts may involve thousands of plaintiffs, each with several witness testimonies, thus driving the need for court reporters that record the legal record of the testimony.

Legal Records Collection

When a company is sued by individuals claiming to have been injured by the company’s product, the medical records of these individuals must be collected to understand whether the allegations are true or if the harm could be caused by another source. Mass torts can involve thousands of plaintiffs, each with several medical records in different formats, distributed throughout a variety of custodians and geographic locations. This drives the need for retrieval services companies to locate the files and carry out the processes of file retrieval, organize data and review services when necessary.

Discovery Services (and e-Discovery Services)

Discovery services are a critical legal spend for many corporate legal departments and thus require thorough analytical scrutiny. Discovery service providers primarily deliver collection, processing and production services. It is crucial that legal departments receive the highest quality possible for their high-stakes matters while keeping excessive costs at bay. In the past, Argopoint has helped legal departments analyze their use of these services to cut costs dramatically. Read more on ediscovery here.

Implementable Solutions and Significant Savings

We can assist in navigating the myriad of options now available to legal departments, and optimizing the use of these services, often through the establishment of preferred provider programs, the use of alternative/flat fees or other innovative models. Argopoint clients have typically saved 15-25% while increasing the quality of services delivered.