With multiple teams of expert and enthusiastic lawyers, all highly-trained in U.S. and/or U.K. legal work and serving our clients in an expeditious and cost-effective manner around the clock, legal outsourcing through SmithDehn INDIA can make a radical and positive difference in both expense and result. The advantages of litigation support from SmithDehn INDIA can mean victory instead of defeat, or settling early and favorably, rather than settling later and/or at a punishing cost.

Although, like other LPO (legal process outsourcing) companies, we do provide extremely useful “lower-end” support services such as document management, review, and coding, our focus is on the provision of high-end, high-quality, knowledge-based services, such as legal research and drafting.

In accordance with the codes of professional conduct and ethics governing the practice of law in the United States and the United Kingdom, the expert lawyers of SmithDehn INDIA who are not licensed in the U.S. or the U.K. do not provide U.S. or U.K. legal advice. Instead, we provide streamlined, creative, and result-oriented litigation support, performing a multitude of research, drafting and other tasks that can be done in India and supervised by licensed attorneys, faster and at a fraction of the cost.

As The New York Times reported:

“The reason for the shift echoes the reason companies are sending other work abroad: they save substantial amounts of money. Some companies say they can reduce certain legal costs by as much as 50 percent, and receive work that rivals what they can obtain in the United States. According to Dennis Archer, the President of the American Bar Association, ‘The need to cut costs reaches across many departments, so it should be no surprise that it goes to the legal department as well’…. ‘There is no problem with off-shoring,’ said Stephen Gillers, a professor at NYU School of Law and a legal ethics expert, ‘because even though the lawyer in India is not authorized by an American state to practice law, the review by American lawyers sanitizes the process.’ ”

("Corporate America Sending More Legal Work to Bombay,” March 14, 2004)

SDD Global’s litigation support enables attorneys and solicitors – in the U.S., the U.K. and elsewhere – to focus on the elements of litigation that actually require the work of a licensed professional. The result is that attorneys or solicitors, whether their practice is in-house or with outside law firms, can concentrate on the areas that they handle best, such as determination of litigation strategy, negotiations with other parties, oral arguments and trials.

The dramatic difference that SmithDehn INDIA makes can be seen at every stage of litigation, as explained below.

SmithDehn INDIA enhances and strengthens its clients’ positions before litigation begins. With SmithDehn INDIA performing the necessary legal research, on a cost-effective basis, attorneys can more quickly and thoroughly than ever before, assess the strengths and weaknesses of a client’s position in an impending suit and predict the full scope of available damages. This allows the clients to secure the strongest possible stance in pre-litigation negotiations and settlement discussions. SmithDehn INDIA’s clients that are facing claims are not held hostage by the usual runaway costs associated with the threat of litigation. This substantially reduces the pressure to make “nuisance-value” pay-outs. Similarly, SmithDehn INDIA clients that have claims against others, have access to the most cost-effective means of making judgments about the viability of such claims before litigation begins, and of obtaining a satisfactory settlement or other resolution, without fear of fees or expenses running amok.

SmithDehn INDIA’s litigation support group can strip much of the costs associated with the interlocutory stages of litigation. SmithDehn INDIA’s litigation support professionals can draft interlocutory litigation papers and other documents with speed and efficiency. Whether an SmithDehn INDIA client needs a set of pleadings, discovery requests or responses, affidavits, subpoenas, motion papers, memoranda of law, settlement agreements or trial preparation documents -- all of these can be drafted by SmithDehn INDIA’s trained litigation support teams. Moreover, our litigation teams are trained to work for clients across various state and federal jurisdictions and even continents.

Furthermore, the review of discovery/disclosure -- which sometimes requires firms to deploy small armies of legal associates -– also can be performed by SmithDehn INDIA, both faster and at a fraction of the cost. This helps clients avoid the undesirable position in which legal costs detrimentally influence the direction and the likelihood of success of litigation strategy.

Throughout the interim stages of litigation, our support teams can perform the legal research that is needed to constantly improve and maintain the strength of our clients’ positions. The traditional mindset -- that a legal dispute must invariably be lengthy -- is changing, with SmithDehn INDIA streamlining the litigation process by constantly preparing for the future and foreseeable stages of a case. Discovery requests can be served and responded-to ahead of schedule, and motions made promptly, so that otherwise typical delays are avoided.

On the subject of speed, the advantages of SmithDehn INDIA are extraordinary. Our support teams add approximately 12 hours to the normal litigation workday. As litigators in the West head home to sleep, a fresh round of litigation support on the day shift in India is just beginning, in a time zone that is essentially a day ahead.

As a situation demands, we can provide the assistance of a single researcher or a team of trained professionals, thus enabling our clients to “flood the zone” where such an approach is warranted. This is virtually the opposite of the practice of many large law firms, which, by necessity, must promise their litigation clients "lean staffing" of cases, to address well-founded fears of compounded hourly fees climbing through the roof. Our aim in litigation support, whether it is on behalf of a defendant or a plaintiff, is to help obtain the desired result for our clients as quickly as possible, through the appropriate and unstinting application of concentrated legal pressure. We have found that in using this approach, we and our supervising U.S. and U.K. attorneys and solicitors often run circles around the so-called "lean staffing" of mega-firms.

In the rare event that any SmithDehn INDIA client’s case does need to proceed to trial, we can support our corporate clients, law firm clients and others in their preparation of trial exhibits and other documents. Preparing for trial is an inherently laborious and costly process, but those costs now can be reduced dramatically, with the work done far more efficiently and faster, by SmithDehn INDIA.

The SmithDehn INDIA legal support team also can perform the more cumbersome case management tasks that are necessary in any lawsuit, which, while simple, can mount and result in additional and unexpected costs for clients. These tasks include organizing client files, managing the online electronic court-filing of litigation papers, and maintaining and monitoring case-watch reports for changes and updates in cases.

Find out more about how our teams handle legal research and drafting , here.