Legal process outsourcer

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Looks traveled. Hey—it’s lunchtime—let’s cook by electric chair.

They scrounged. They ad-libbed. Flash scrounged hot dogs. Laurent scrounged corned beef.

They packed them in. They stuffed the hoods. They pulled the switches. Sparks popped. The meat fried. The hoods dripped fat.

The meat cooked uneven. The concept rocked. The reality stunk.

—James Ellroy, The Cold Six Thousand

A firm that collects the windfalls and low—hanging fruit of contract negotiation by engaging cheap, paralegal staff, often in remote jurisdictions, to crunch through low-value legal processes no one else can be bothered to do doing properly.

According to soothsayers, seers and other miscellaneous blindfolded dartsmen of the legal industry, LPOs are a major disrupting force that will fundamentally re-engineer the industry. Or may have quietly already done so without anyone else noticing.

They may now, or may not, be at great risk from LLMs. But aren’t we all?

The LPO business model is easy to articulate in a four-box diagram, but hard to execute in practice. Hence there are very few of them out there, and they haven’t really made inroads on mainstream legal practice.

See also

• Law firm
• Thought leader