Last week I shared some New Year’s wishes for both law firms and in-house counsel – aspirations for how the profession might and should evolve.   I promised that this week I would make some predictions of what to expect for 2012.  For a crystal ball I will rely primarily on the questions I have heard in my practice, from both in-house and law firm management looking to make improvements.  Whether those conversations are a fair and representative sample and a reasonable indicator of where the profession is headed, of course, remains to be seen.

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‘Tis the holiday season, at least in the West, with Christmas (and Boxing Day) ever so recently behind us, and Hannukah and Kwanzaa still very much in evidence.  What better time to make a wish, for both the practice and business of law.  I’ll tee up some aspirations here, and follow next week with my views for what we can realistically expect from 2012.  Given that these are both short weeks for many, and that my crystal ball is looking rather murky, I’ll keep these posts short and sweet.

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For the last couple of posts, I described an interesting workshop on legal process outsourcing (LPO) that I had the opportunity to facilitate at the ACC Annual Meeting in Denver.  Part 1 of this workshop focused on the choices in-house counsel can make about what to outsource and to what end, while part 2, which I described last week, focused on the criteria used to select a provider that would be a good fit to what is being outsourced and why.  This week’s post wraps up this mini-series by looking at the challenges of managing relationships, with LPO providers and law firms, after you’ve done a deal.

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As I mentioned in my last post, I had the opportunity to facilitate a working session on legal process outsourcing (LPO) at the ACC Annual Meeting in Denver.  The discussion was a lively one, with those more experienced sharing some lessons learned, and those newer to, or on the verge of, outsourcing pushing back and asking lots of questions.  In that post I described a part of the session, which included a case study and a vigorous audience discussion around the possible reasons to outsource legal processes and the kinds of value to be gained from doing so.  In this post, I want to move forward to our discussion about how to select an appropriate provider.

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