Having made a decision to outsource some of your work and now aware of the possibility of a project failing without adequate preparation, one will appreciate the fact that vendor selection is of crucial importance.
So, what should you look out for in a vendor?
• Find out how long the company has been operating and how it has fared so far.
• Look into the past history of the company and learn about the kinds of projects they did in the past, the problems they faced and how they dealt with them, and how much time it took to complete them. Whether the project was completed within the calculated budget is also important in vendor selection.
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We have looked into cross culture differences as a reason for an offshore outsourcing project failing. There are some other common causes, however, besides that and we shall look into these.

All too often the goals and scope of the project are not made very clear to the service provider. The offshore vendor is given the impression that cost reduction is the ultimate goal.
And indeed, cost reduction may sometimes be the only motivation for outsourcing work. This defeats the purpose in itself as the service provider may not be able to achieve this given the rising salaries of IT and BPO employees. Rather than making cost reduction the primary motivation identify and focus on the value you hope to get from the project. If you decide to outsource to the lowest bidder you may be in for a lot of disappointment and a lot more cost in rectifying situations gone wrong.
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In spite of the ever growing number of projects outsourced there still are some that are not so successful. As one of those who may have had an unpleasant experience you may be trying to fathom what really happened. As a prospective outsourcer you may look into the causes too, so that you can avoid the pitfalls.
First of all we need to remind ourselves that there really are some very marked cross-cultural differences and it is because of this that a particular outsourcing project may be misunderstood or misinterpreted. This is one of the major problems faced when outsourcing, because the service provider is unable to fathom the work philosophy of the outsourcing firm as a result of which they cannot work well together.
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In its January issue, the New York Law Journal described legal outsourcing to India as a reality.
Commenting on the decreasing level of resistance to it and the corresponding acceptance of it, the journal put this mainly down to the cost advantage.
“LPO salaries for Indian lawyers are generally well below 10,000 USD a year. By comparison, a US contract lawyer usually earns around 30 USD an hour while associate base salaries at major firms in New York start at 160,000 USD a year,” the journal says.
The report details how companies having already outsourced their work to India have had positive experiences.
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Of course, as anyone will tell you, one of the main reasons for outsourcing is the financial benefits derived from it. But one must consider what the security risks are and whether they are worth the savings. The CIO (Chief Information Officer), Chief Security Officer and other officials concerned must always ensure that the firm or company is not exposing itself to unnecessary security risks in the process.
These officials should first take certain security issues into account. One must bear in mind that officials and employees not really from your firm are going to have access to your computer systems and to sensitive data. Think about how their activities will be monitored. Will one be able to ensure that all access to data can be restricted once a certain project has been completed?
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Indian colleges and universities produce about four million non-technical graduates and 400,000 engineering graduates each year. In spite of this vast talent pool the NASSCOM-McKinsey Report 2005, revealed that only about 25 percent of technical graduates and 10-15 percent of general college graduates from India were suitable for employment in the offshore IT and BPO industries.
And with the Indian ITES-BPO industry growing at breakneck speed it was found necessary to look ahead and develop workforce initiatives at the earliest.
With this in mind, Hewitt Associates and NASSCOM (National Association of Software and Service Companies), the apex body of Indian IT & service companies, along with the ITES-BPO industry, created an ‘Assessment and Certification Program’ called NASSCOM Assessment of Competence (NAC).
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Soon to be forty years old, CPA (Computer Patent Annuities) is one of the world’s legal outsourcing companies. Founded in 1969, in Jersey, Channel Islands, it now has offices across the world in places such as the United States, Europe, Asia and the Pacific serving over 40,000 clients and handling more than 2 million patent, design and trademark records.
The company meets the legal and IP requirements of both, corporate clients (Microsoft and Intel among them), and attorney firms, and offers a whole spectrum of legal services ranging from litigation support and document review to research and consulting.
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Data mining, also known as Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) can be defined as the unearthing and extraction of relevant information from innumerable databases in order to be analyzed for a specific purpose. With the ever growing volumes of knowledge available today it is no longer a simple task of looking for what you want and finding it. It is no longer a question of just interpreting it either. Although used primarily by financial analysts and business intelligence organizations it is now used for other purposes such as marketing and e-commerce, legal work being one of them.
When a lawyer does legal research he refers to different available resources such as offline periodicals, treatises and journals, but one cannot deny the importance of online resources for finding data for both, State and Federal law.
Thus data mining involves a good amount of blood, sweat and tears. And isn’t it wonderful if someone else could do all that work for you. It would free you up for more pressing and intricate tasks.
Since it requires plenty of time and patience one can have recourse to legal outsourcing and seek help from outsourcing companies which will not only extract the data but will also filter and arrange it for you.
The procedure of analyzing the data has now been more or less automated and new methods and new tools are employed for this purpose. Data mining software can and will scan the Internet and find the information you require. But even were you to use the most appropriate software you would still need someone to complete the project and that is where outsourcing the job will be most convenient.

A one-day conference on the International Outsourcing of the Legal Profession is being organized by Berkeley’s Institute for Global Challenges and the Law, at the Boalt Hall, School of Law, University of California, in ten days time on Friday, April 25 from 9am-5pm.
The venue will be The Bancroft Hotel, 2680 Bancroft Way, Berkeley, CA 94704.
It is hoped that the conference will initiate an increased volume of public dialogue on the outsourcing of legal work and the hidden costs.
Sponsored by The Berkeley Center for Law & Technology (BCLT) and The Berkeley Center for Law, Business and the Economy (BCLBE), the event will tackle several issues with regard to legal outsourcing such as the type of legal work being outsourced, to whom it is being outsourced, and the impact outsourcing will have “on the elite guild nature of the legal profession and on U.S. employment as a whole”.
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On Wednesday, April 2, Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton made known her desire to put a halt to tax credits for companies offshoring jobs and to “insource” a larger number of jobs at home.
Signaling the end of her six-day “Solutions for America” tour of Pennsylvania, Clinton revealed a $7 billion tax incentive and investment plan at a panel discussion at the Pittsburgh’s IBEW Conference Center and training facility.
Pointing out how “companies like Exxon Mobil, which has parked $56 million in profits overseas,” were being “rewarded” Clinton stated that tax dollars were being used to ship jobs overseas.
The New York senator suggested the expansion of tax benefits for research and development instead through the increase of the existing credit by 50 percent, and by generating a 40 percent research and development credit specifically for basic research.
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