Capita enter the legal process outsourcing market

Capita has for many years been synonymous with business process outsourcing, but not in the legal services sector.  That is all set to change as it looks to enter the LPO market on the back of a successful pilot project with Pinsent Masons (“Pinsent”).  Given Capita’s size and capital resources, the existing incumbents in that market will doubtless be forced to sit up and take note.

Pinsent has recently been using a Capita office in Krakow to review documents in an e-disclosure exercise for a large legal dispute.  Capita assembled a team of 85 individuals, whose work was overseen by Pinsent lawyers shipped out to Poland for the purpose, in an attempt to drive down costs for the client (and presumably drive up margins for Pinsent at the same time).  This is not the first time that Pinsent has used a legal process outsourcer – it was one of the earlier pioneers of the practice - but it is the first time that Capita has entered that arena as a provider.

From the perspective of a law firm, outsourcing labour-intensive tasks such as e-discovery offers not only the ability to carry out work in a lower cost location, but also obviates the need to carry the fixed costs of large teams of people who may not be fully utilised all of the time.  In today’s tough market where many firms are scrabbling to reduce fixed costs, this is a significant consideration.

Although Capita will doubtless be hoping to receive more work from Pinsent, it appears that the pilot was not designed with this particularly in mind – according to an article in The Lawyer, Pinsent intends to decide which LPO provider to use on a case-by-case basis rather than electing to partner with any one provider for future projects.  Nevertheless, Capita are apparently sufficiently pleased with the way that the pilot went that they plan to move aggressively into this new niche, competing with the likes of CPA and Integreon.