Law firms are now large and complicated businesses. In order to increase their revenues they now merge, spend money on marketing, pay serious attention to policies, and spread their branches to different places, even abroad.
They, however , are more concerned with increasing their income rather than controlling expenses.
They have started outsourcing back-office functions like mailroom, copy center and payroll, but most importantly in IT. Managing software and systems upgrades, and network operations, are outsourced to a great degree. Law practice itself is also outsourced.

One important aspect of legal outsourcing is secretarial support. Often it is difficult to find legal secretaries and still more difficult to get the right secretary for the right lawyer. When one secretary works for more than one lawyer, as often happens, things get even more difficult. In order to solve this crisis firms are often over staffed with secretaries working during off hours and even on holidays. With workloads and resources varying they find this necessary and it often helps to solve the problem to a certain extent. There are still personality clashes, mismatches, underperformance, And quality control to consider.
A firm that outsources secretarial services will find the vendor not only more cost efficient but more efficient overall. The tasks at hand are matched to the best secretaries for them. There is strict quality control (something almost impossible in large law firms with numerus lawyers and even more numerous secretaries) and performance evaluation and dead lines are met more promptly. It also becomes more possible for legal secretaries to perform higher value tasks.
When outsourcing, firms can use a subscription plan with which they pay a fixed monthly fee for unlimited support, or one for a certain number of hours.
Lawyers as well as secretaries send tasks by e-mail, fax, and telephone. The vendors have leaders who ensure that the work is doane correctly and on time, after which there is a quality check.
They also ensure that confidentiality is maintained and employ only persons whose backgrounds have been cleared.
With low cost computing and cost effective, dependable, high-speed communication many tasks can be performed from afar. Thus the legal market has assumed an even more business-like approach. Operations are improved, and offer clients a higher level of service while obviously reducing costs.