Reflections on Legal Managed Services

Today, the market for Alternative Legal Service Providers 'ALSPs' is now reportedly valued at over $20 billion annually1 and only looks set to grow, driven by strained balance sheets and consequent demand around efficiency, technology and, importantly, value.

Within the ALSP sector, legal managed services mean different things to different people. At Konexo, we have developed an approach that engages with a broad spectrum of client challenges. If, after exploring with clients, it transpires that we are considering lower volumes of agreements that need to be negotiated and maintained, we look to utilize our well established community of interim lawyers to support the work. For clients with higher volumes of legal work, we drive value by seeking to transform how these services are delivered; we use technology, including artificial intelligence, process improvement and a range of different team locations to improve delivery and efficiency.

So what are the hot topics in legal managed services and how do we see the market developing over the next five years?

• going global: global companies need high-quality legal support across borders, often requiring 24/7 support. The COVID pandemic drove us all to embrace how technology can provide a consistent chassis that global operating models can deploy around. Clients can now have an efficient 'follow the sun' model and benefit from lower cost bases in different jurisdictions, whilst still having a standard delivery approach across teams, meaning consistency in controls, standards and outputs

Case study: Global Legal Managed Services

We worked with a global bank to move its legal managed service delivery from a single provider in one location to a global delivery model. Our delivery teams in the UK and Asia are now managing the full volume of in-scope work, delivering over 1500+ contracts a year. We focus on continuous improvement using learnings through our experience, insight and innovation and have delivered consistency in risk management with the use of playbooks and contracting principles tailored to meet the bank’s requirements.

• data-driven decisions: in today's legal market, data is key; teams are tapping into cutting-edge AI to dig out the gold from mountains of documents and legal data. This helps legal teams make smarter choices, foresee outcomes and spot patterns. Clients expect high-quality meaningful data on the day-to-day activity of the legal managed service as standard. This data is then used to do things like drive a dynamic relationship between service delivery and risk appetite. For example, in tracking average turnaround and completion times for different work types, we can target where we need to simplify playbooks to speed up the process and, by reporting final negotiated positions in contracts against the 'preferred' position, we can shine a light on areas where risk appetite may need to change to match what is happening in practice
• embedding technology: technology has always been at the heart of our legal managed services, regardless of whether we are helping small groups of interim lawyers manage their work better through simple workflow or orchestrating complex work types and large teams, across jurisdictions, through AI-enabled triage and allocation. The maturation of legal managed services will, in turn, reflect the maturation of legal technology and we stay close to these developments as a matter of survival
• delivering flexibility: as alluded to at the start of this article, corporates of all shapes and sizes are now dipping their toe into legal managed services. This presents an overwhelming spectrum of requirements and variation. Trying stubbornly to push an industrial solution developed for a global investment bank to a mid-sized regional Fintech company is going to leave everybody frustrated. Being able quickly to detect exactly what clients require and then articulate and deliver a flexible and scaled solution is absolutely paramount as the sector explodes with growth

What does the future hold?

As clients become more comfortable with legal technology and AI and, consequently, as access to granular legal data becomes more operational, we anticipate seeing an increase in appetite, across the spectrum of clients, to legal managed services. Key for the likes of Konexo will be to employ this legal data in a way that allows us to provide bespoke services for our clients, best managing the balancing act between flexible resourcing and robust industrialized solutions.

Case study: Managing 20,000 agreements annually

Our client operated a decentralized, lawyer-led, manual operating model, to process large volumes of standard contractual documentation in the US. Konexo, alongside Autologyx, designed and delivered a single portal through which each legal service could be initiated and monitored. The portal presents the client user with a bespoke dashboard of all in-flight matters, alerts and notifications and guides the requestor through each stage of the process. It allocates requests to the appropriate legal delivery teams and generates powerful management information for senior stakeholders.

Konexo also provides an extended hours service to the client by using both US and UK delivery options - 98% of instructions are accepted immediately using the portal, sophisticated workflows, robotics and AI. For the client, it has delivered a cost-saving of over 40% on the previous model, whilst improving consistency, quality and turnaround times and the ability to handle peaks in demand.