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The country's largest software exporter Tata Consultancy Services could soon join domestic rivals Infosys and Wipro for a slice of the multi-billion legal process outsourcing market.
“It (the legal process outsourcing segment) seems like an interesting space…we are currently looking at it,” the TCS Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director, Mr N Chandrasekaran, told Business Line in a recent interview.
Hiring
However, he did not give further details of the company's strategy going forward.
The company has already begun on a “small scale” with 2-3 clients and has raised hiring, both in India and the UK, for this practice, said a source familiar with the development. However, TCS will make a big ticket announcement only when the business achieves sizable scale, the source added.
LPO is a different ball game from the regular back-office work as it refers to the practice of a law firm or corporation obtaining legal support services from an outside law firm or legal support services company.
Litigation and business document review, contract management, electronic discovery, legal analytics and document preparation are some of the services outsourced to third party vendors.
TCS has been active in providing technology solutions to law firms globally. Earlier this year, the Law Society of England and Wales selected TCS' flagship legal management solution as part of a systems development project.
LPO vendors
The Indian LPO space is dominated by pure play LPO vendors such as Pangea3, CPA Global, Unitedlex, and Evalueserve. Some of these firms have been growing at over 100 per cent in the last few years largely because they charge a fraction of the $150-350 an hour billed by an attorney in major markets such as the US and the UK.
In fact, LPO was one of the few industries which got a shot in the arm following the economic meltdown of 2008 as the pressure to control costs pushed more legal services work into the third party realm.
According to a Nasscom market intelligence report, the LPO segment is expected to touch $15 billion by 2015.
Bangalore-based Infosys and Wipro have been actively pursuing opportunities in the LPO space for the last few years now.
In June last year, Wipro's BPO arm won a LPO contract to provide trademark filing and docketing services to Microsoft.
TCS' back-office business, which includes its LPO initiatives, generated revenues of Rs 10,157 crore for the quarter ended March 31.
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