How to Keep Review Moving Along While the Sun Shines
By Christine Yi, vice president of strategy and special initiatives for Conduent
Complying with deadlines in data-intensive discovery and regulatory matters is challenging enough, but when your timeframe and budget is also limited, it can be entirely challenging to identify, collect, review, and produce sought after information within the confines of a “typical” 9 to 5 workday. If you rely exclusively on local lawyers to manage your document review, you may be limited to fewer than eight hours of quality review time each day.
In our current business environment, the “typical” workday doesn’t stop when the sun goes down. With many managed review options available today, it doesn’t have to. A cost-effective solution using qualified overseas labor can fill the gap that may remain when American lawyers leave work for the day, and can ensure your review project makes continuous progress, day and night.
As reported by Gabe Friedman in Bloomberg BNA’s article, “Conduent Moves to India, ‘Follow the Sun’ Model,” Conduent recently expanded its Noida, India operations to included managed review services. This offshore facility has workspace that is highly scalable to accommodate another half of a global workforce. This location in India supplements our other capabilities available in Detroit, Houston, New York, and Washington, D.C., enabling our global clients to maintain a continuous work cycle.
Though offshore review is now commonplace (and not a new venture), some clients are still hesitant to outsource document review work outside of the United States. However, consider the many benefits. First, pricing can be competitive and significantly lower than onshore or nearshore reviews. Additionally for those legal service providers that offer end-to-end discovery services, “all in” project pricing can be at a further lower cost. Second, the combination of onshore and offshore managed review capabilities can offer clients 24/7/365 support, when needed, with review being offered across multiple shifts in India and “following the sun” to the U.S. This global workflow allows for a contiguous 24/7 workforce and can be an ideal fit for certain clients and types of matters, especially those with time-sensitive demands or other process optimization needs (i.e., first-pass review conducted by the offshore review team and privilege, key issues and/or final pass review conducted by a U.S. based team). Third, clients can leverage additional expertise in certain technical subject matters or LPO/BPO processes that offshore teams often excel in, such as intellectual property, engineering, finance and contract management.
Conduent’s staffing model is innovative in the offshore managed review industry. Our foundation for a strong and highly capable staff is a hybrid approach – this staffing approach includes our full time core team and is augmented with staff from local law firms where we have entered into preferred agreements that supply us with local lawyers who can work on a project-by-project basis. This model is a strong differentiator for clients, since it is not only far more scalable and robust, but allows for less error prone work product as compared to our competitors’ who rely mostly on FTE models that could limit or be arduous for ramp up capability. This model directly translates to better work quality for clients, without them worrying about a service provider’s infrastructure or labor constraints. There are other obvious considerations such as client’s key security and data protection concerns, and scalability (for a later posting).
In short, offshore managed review can deliver efficiencies that can help you make the most of every billable minute under the sun.
Christine Yi is vice president of strategy and special initiatives at Conduent. She can be reached at info@conduent.com.