In-House Counsel

A case study of offshore assistance to a law department regarding contract review

By Rees Morrison

According to an e-mail I received, a US telecommunications company needed over twelve thousand documents to be reviewed and filtered for pre-identified contractual issues and verified against certain online information. The law department asked Corplo, a legal support service (LSS) provider based in New Delhi, India, to review, extract and deliver in a predefined template ready-to-act information on each document.

At the start, the client and Corplo set up a project steering committee. An initial challenge was to impart a precise understanding of the project deliverables, which was done through a series of emails and a couple of teleconferences. Corplo did a partial review of a sample set of documents for initial client feedback to ensure that the deliverables matched what the client wanted. The project deliverables were planned in a phased schedule, so as to address any contingencies based on client feedback of initial phases and any potential changes in the specifications. Corplo completed the project within the time agreed, three months and three days, using a team of 13 professionals - 8 reviewers, 3 QA, 1 Project Manager and 1 Delivery Manager.

As summarized by Corplo, the most critical factors attributable to the success of the assignment were:

• The highly cooperative client team with quick feedback, clarifications and a willingness to consider new methods.
• Well-defined and elaborate project management processes for training, execution, escalation and quality control
• Three-tier quality assurance namely, (i) peer review, (ii) review by QA Team and (iii) pre-delivery audit by the delivery team.

Full post as published by Law Department Management on March 16, 2009 (boomark / email).