Outsourcing Without Terror

The Central Industrial Security Force Act (CISF) has been active, on paper at least, since 1968. The Act provided cover against terrorist attacks mainly to central government installations and public sector undertakings.  Of note, the CISF  covers public monuments, including ‘samadhis’, which does raise a question of how come the long dead-and-gone are of more value than the living, particularly since despite active lobbying by the private sector the Act had so far not provided cover to any private sector undertakings or joint ventures. 

However, post 26/11 the concerns of the private sector fuelled by global anxieties about security issues relating to business with India, reached a crescendo, ultimately resulting in the amendment to the CISF Act in February 2009.  This amendment extended CISF cover to establishments in the private sector, where threat perceptions were adjudged to be the highest, by Indian intelligence agencies.

The IT sector is the first to be allowed such cover.   Strangely, the hospitality industry, read 5-star hotels, which was the target of 26/11, has not been granted CISF cover as yet, despite repeated terror threats even after 26/11.

The CISF security net comes at a steep price.  It is provided on a full cost-reimbursement basis.  However, to the multinational corporations which are raking in profits in dollars and pounds, this is not an issue.  They are prepared to pay the price, if only to let their foreign clients sleep easy.

The security cover provided includes paramilitary personnel, commandoes trained to strike and fire at terrorists, and to prevent and retaliate in case of terrorist attacks.  CISF also provides consultancy services, in fire and security.  Data protection however, is not its field.  Nor will the security personnel under CISF perform the services performed by your regular security guards.  Companies will have to continue to hire their regular security staff for that.

The giants-Infosys, Wipro and Reliance are the winners in the scramble for CISF cover.  They can well afford it.  What about the smaller fry?  Should someone be thinking in terms of training and arming and maintaining private security forces to provide cover to smaller establishments? 

The question of course remains as to how effective any form of security cover could be when faced with an attack like the 26/11 one.

MAKE YOUR RESUME WORK FOR YOU

BEFORE WRITING YOUR RESUME:

THINK:  Your resume is YOU.  When a prospective employer reads your resume, he/she is looking at what you are.  Your resume should present a picture of you.

UPDATED RESUME:  If you have been hopping in and out of jobs or working on different projects for brief periods, maintain a diary of the projects you worked on and keep your resume updated on these.  If you have worked on new or different software, or learned a different skill, make notes and remember to update your resume with those.

NEVER LIE.   A single lie, even a white one, will doom your prospects.

KEEP IT CONCISE:  No more than one or two pages.

MAKE IT TARGETED:   Don’t send the same resume for different job-types.  Target your resume to the job.  If you are technically qualified as well as a good writer and are applying for the post of copywriter which requires mainly writing skills, emphasize your writing skills and achievements, mentioning tech qualifications briefly.  Conversely, while applying for a technical job, emphasize those skills and experience mentioning writing prowess as an additional skill.

DON’T TRY TO BE CREATIVE:  A creative resume is one written in an informal style.  This can be arresting and interesting, but unless you are applying for a creative post, refrain from doing it.  You might come across as being unprofessional.

WHILE WRITING:

MAKE IT CHRONOLOGICAL:  Begin with the latest qualification or job and move backwards.  If you have a degree that presupposes having an earlier degree, you need only mention the latter one.  For example, a B.A. cannot be had in India without the qualification of an HSC.  So if you are a B.A., you need only list B.A., unless you scored really high in the HSC results, in which case this deserves a special mention.  Again, if you went to a really prestigious school/college, mention this in your resume, since like it or not, a good school makes a difference in terms of communications and attitude.  If you do not happen to have attended any well known institution, just mention your academic qualifications, the university you got them from, and leave it at that.

GAPS IN JOBS:  When listing jobs you have held, mention the period for each job.  If there is a break in jobs, state the reason for the break e. g., study break, a break to have a baby; look after a parent, etc.  If your job graph shows a gap because you were unemployed then you could just mention the year in which you worked at a job for e.g., if you worked for six months in the year 2006 and were unemployed the rest of the year, just put: “2006: Worked as research assistant to Dr. Dubey at Pune University.”

If you are questioned, tell the truth.

LONG TIME -ONE JOB: If you have been at a single job for a long time mention the promotions you received at that job and the various job functions you performed.  This helps remove the idea of being stagnated in a job.  For e.g., 1985 to 1997:  Legal assistant to Advocate Seth.  Filing, keeping accounts, drafting sale deeds, conveyance, court appearances.

LISTING SPECIAL AWARDS:  Mention awards and scholarships received separately; but do remember that your employer is not interested in the prize you won for winning the tennis match in Grade 10, or the prize you won in the chess tournament held on Company Day.  Any pro bono work, affiliation with NGOs, voluntary work should be mentioned.

LISTING HOBBIES:  Unless you have some really unusual hobby like digital art, photography, designing, or bartending, do not list hobbies.  If you are requested to list them, be truthful and don’t try to impress by saying things like coin collection, when all the coins you have are the ones that went out of circulation a couple of years back.

PERSONAL INFORMATION OR SALARY HISTORY:  Never, except on specific request.

AFTER COMPLETION:

SIT ON IT: Don’t send it off at once.  Read it again the next day or in a couple of days.  You will find it needs editing and additions.  Also get someone else’s feedback on it.

BRIEF COVER LETTER: Address the cover letter directly to the person who is offering you the job.  If you do not know the name, find out; if not, address it to the position, for e.g.: The Personnel Manager, Dublin & Co.

MAIL IT:  If you are sending off your resume by e-mail to several different companies, do not lump names of all the companies together, in the address column.  That’s really stupid.  Send to each addressee separately.

Do write in if you have queries.

The Freshers' Future

Posting in a long while.  Sincere apologies and a promise to post every fortnight. 

Last week while at college I was asked what was the scene like in LPOs.  Well, cost cutting seems to be the name of the game these days.  Rightly so.  Whether you are, or are not affected by the recession, or the situation in the US, this is not a time to be insular.  It is rather a time to work together to overcome the financial crisis.

The future of legal outsourcing has been discussed threadbare.  Everyone seems to agree that it is going to go places despite the recession in the US.  Personally I feel that this may not be so in the very near future at least. 

But the bottom line in business is profits and while a firm could decide NOT to offshore work where the anticipated profits are small and thus be seen to be patriotic, where larger profits are involved, the work will be offshored, immaterial of considerations of political correctness. 

The affect this side of the pond will be that small projects may not be offshored but the bigger ones certainly will.  Similarly the smaller legal firms abroad would decide to offshore work simply because they cannot afford not to.  They need to make profits in order to survive.

It is very true that the most affected by the state of the economy, are freshers.  Every company even those with bigger projects on hand, is preferring to recruit on a temporary basis and not face the hassle of handing out yearly packages.  Go with the flow.  Take what comes and be sure to keep note of where you worked and what you worked on.  Some day soon, all this work experience on your resume is going to look good.

Another concern expressed was that of US and UK lawyers being employed in Indian LPOs.  I really do not think the figures would be significant enough to affect the professional prospects of Indian lawyers.  However, even if they are, I think if you are going to go global, you have to be ready to face the competition. 

I repeat and repeat, polish your language and communication skills.  This is your Achilles heel. 

Next week’s post:  On Resumes and References.

 

PGDin Legal Process Outsourcing

The Indira Gandhi National Open University has just announced a one-year post-graduate diploma course in Legal Process Outsourcing. The eligibility for the course is a degree in Law and final year law students also may apply. www.ignouonline.ac.in/pgdipo. Now this is a first.
An earlier post also talks about the Global Legal Professional Certification Test for those seeking a career in LPOs.
I doubt they would be teaching you anything there that you would not learn in your first couple of months on an LPO job but in a competitive world, any extra teeth are always useful.

Do remember that irrespective of the number of diplomas and degrees and your degree of technical knowledge, no LPO is going to hire you if you do not have a good knowledge of spoken and written English.

RECRUITMENT IN AN LPO: Freshers are generally hired by most firms for all the routine dig-the-dirt jobs. What an LPO looks for while recruiting freshers is a good knowledge of English, a good law degree, and some computer knowledge, in that order.

For the high-end jobs, an LPO would seek legal professionals with an excellent command over English, good law degrees from reputed colleges, an ability to carry out legal research, and an ability to be able to compile and draft documents. Since legal process outsourcing is a new field, experience of working in an LPO in such a capacity would be invaluable, but if you can show that you have the potential to do such work, lack of experience would not really be a hindrance.

If you have done any thesis or have written papers in your college courses, (which involved researching, collecting material, compiling a paper) put that in your resume. You might, even if you are a fresher, be considered for the quality jobs.

Some good news on the Pune LPO front. I hear of start up LPOs which are undertaking legal process work outsourced by Indian law firms. (Watch this space for news on such LPOs.)

For those setting out on a career in LPOs, the LPOs tackling local legal process outsourcing jobs are a safer bet to work for, than those which handle only offshored projects because the latter are at some time or other going to face a gap in between projects, which means you are going to be laid off at the end of the project.

An LPO which handles local work as well as offshored projects, will usually have projects the year round. So those of you looking to start a career in outsourcing, you should, at least initially, opt for those LPO firms which handle both local and offshored projects, if you don’t want frequent ‘breaks’ in your career graph.

All the best,

Types of Jobs in LPOs

To conclude the discussion in my last post, on the type of work you could find in an LPO.

Legal Research Projects: This is really enjoyable work but does require some experience in actually conducting research. Unfortunately, the syllabus for the LL.B. and the BSL.LLB. course followed in our colleges, does not provide any training in conducting legal research. However, the Masters’ degree course in Law does, and if you would like to be entrusted with this sort of high-end work it would be better if you equip yourself with an LLM from a good University. (Yes, that makes a difference!) Nevertheless, even that degree is useless if you do not have a grasp over the English language and a keen analytical mind.

A good researcher understands thoroughly the subject he/she is researching; is able to comb through, sift, and filter all the matter collected and ultimately judge what is relevant for the project and what is not. Many LPOs employ freshers to do the base research because freshers are cheap labor. Freshers do not take on the responsibility of deciding which material needs to be jettisoned and which retained, with the result that a load of every and each nugget of information on the subject is put up before the senior researchers, who do the ultimate sifting and filtering. This is a serious waste of time and money, with projects having killing deadlines.

The baseline is that in order to do legal research, you need to be either very good at legal analysis, or you just go get that LLM degree. In either case, make sure your English is good.

Drafting: While you may have been drafting documents, deeds and notices in Indian courts, drafting US and UK legal documents is not exactly the same thing. For one, although UK and Indian laws have a similar base, the legal language there is far superior. Each country also has a definite pattern of drafting documents, which you will learn once you jump into the drafting field, provided you have a flair for the language. This, coupled with a good legal degree, and a little bit of training from the LPO, and you could be all set to work on drafting documents.

Legal transcription: While this generally figures as low end work, it is extremely difficult to get good legal transcriptionists in India, which is the reason why few LPOs handle it. Nowhere else is a command over the language as essential as in this field. Transcription is a process of listening to voice audios and transcribing as you listen and a good legal transcriptionist needs to be able to understand the accents of US and UK attorneys and have some knowledge of the laws of that country. In the US particularly, accents differ depending on the region. Moreover, most attorneys are overworked, harassed persons, whose dictations are peppered with asides and often garbled. Yet, accuracy is essential. Since transcription work often involves court orders and depositions, even a word out of place could prove fatal.

Legal editing: This is the easiest of all LPO jobs. All you need is knowledge and excellence in every other field of work!!! The bright side is that you don’t need to be too tech savvy and you are allowed to be temperamental.

Next post: What would I look for in a prospective LPO employee?

If you have any inputs, criticisms, brickbats, whatever, it would be helpful if you post comments, rather than e-mailing me.

What do I need to join an LPO?

A visit last week, to the courts at Pune convinced me that there are dozens of lawyers out there, longing for a career change. As one of my previous posts mentioned, court corridors in India are not everyone's cup of tea . (Most law students have terrified, glazed expressions after the mandatory college court-visit.) Old lawyer friends, some with 15 and 20 years of experience in law, fledgling lawyers, gathered around wanting some inputs about legal process outsourcing. It's not possible to give impromptu lectures on outsourcing and I said so. The matter might have ended there, had not several telephone calls from lawyers I have never heard of convinced me that I must do something. I have decided therefore, to use this site to 'educate' people about how to go about building a career in outsourcing. This post addresses a couple of the very basic questions asked by some of them:

What special training do I need for getting into an LPO?- No special training is required. Your law degree ( the higher the degree and more the diplomas to your credit, the better,) and a basic knowledge of computers is essential. Some LPOs even function with a staff of mainly computer professionals with a few legal professionals thrown in. But let's not go into that. Essential also, is a good command over the English language.

This unfortunately, is what is most lacking in Indian lawyers. They know to read and write English but spoken English needs serious improvement. I suggest spoken English classes (e-mail me for details) and a continuous practice at reading, writing and speaking in English.

In a previous post, I have spoken about the Global Legal Professional Certification Test and provided the link. Look it up. To my knowledge no LPOs in Pune demand this test, but it would be good to have this under your belt, just to get an edge over the competition.

Generally, what most outsourcing firms look for while recruiting is a candidate with a degree in law, a basic knowledge of computers and a good command over English. If you have specializations in subjects like patents, taxation or cyber law etc. that would definitely be an added asset.

What sort of work would I get to do in an LPO?- This too is discussed in a previous post. At present it is mostly mundane, form-filling work that is available. Some of the older LPOs do have document review work and coding. While the work of filling in forms, (summons, warrants, bankruptcy forms), is easy and anyone can do it, it can get very monotonous.

Document review is more interesting. For this, you will need to be able to read a document, (here is why you need good English), and identify whether the document is relevant or not. Relevancy would be explained to you in the training provided by the Project Director before you begin the project. Your success at this job on how good you are at interpreting the language in a document. A little experience in the legal field, in reading legal documents, court depositions and the like is necessary. You need to have at least looked at a few patents, licenses, sale deeds, mortage documents and similar documents, so you know what you are looking at.

Coding also requires similar skills. Most professionals get adept at document review and coding work once they are through a project or two. So, unless you scraped through your law examinations you should be able to do both document review and coding work, provided of course, as I said you have a couple of years' experience in the legal field.

What about freshers? Many LPOs employ freshers for their coding jobs. Some coding jobs only require data entry type of operations, filling in dates, tagging documents which contain 'relevant' words or communications, which can easily be done by anyone with some knowledge of law and computers. Again a good command over English is essential.

There are other types of work done in LPOs, which will be discussed in my next post. Also discussed would be - what I would look for if I were recruiting a candidate. Wait for it. Until then practice your English.

Is an LLB enough for an LPO ..The GLPC Test

One of the concerns expressed by foreign law firms offshsoring to India, is whether Indian attorneys have the capacity to deliver work on par with their US counterparts. The basis of this concern seems to be the fact that the US attorney has to clear a Bar exam apart from the law exams, which is not the case with the Indian attorney. I think this is a very reasonable concern.

As a teacher of law it has become apparent to me, that the law as taught in our law colleges is strictly examination oriented. In India, law degrees are conferred either after a 5-year law course following secondary school (BSL.LLB.), or as a post-graduate degree in law, (LLB.) Both courses chiefly teach the origin of law, which perforce is a study of British law, and the principal codes of law in India.

Are either of these degrees a sufficient qualification for working in an LPO? Yes, if the work is the sort of work that most LPOs are getting presently, which is mostly a filling of data for summonses, warrants, bankruptcy forms, that any clerk, given some basic training could do.

If however, you are looking at more complicated legal work, a BSL.LLB or an LLB. is not enough. Reviewing documents for assessing their relevancy in a court proceeding, judging patent infringements, or deciding whether a particular document is ‘hot’ needs a more in-depth knowledge of law. Furthermore, the work of drafting documents, or legal research work is impossible to be done competently, with just a Bachelor’s Degree. In fact, for the LLB course, drafting of documents is taught in just the final semester. Legal research is not taught at all.

A Masters degree in Law (LLM), however, makes up for that. The LLM course teaches a study of law from a totally different perspective. The reason, cause and effect of laws is studied which requires a disbanding all the various parts of law and putting them together again. The process necessarily involves use of all your commonsense, reasoning powers, and intelligence. Review and research tools, the process and methodology of legal research are also learned here.

Those few LPOs that are getting high-end legal research work, employ LLB holders to do it, after (perhaps), giving them a very, very brief training on the project. They however, do employ professionals with a Masters Degree in Law to do the actual, final, quality work on the project. If the work is medico-legal in nature, medical professionals too may be called in for a final dekko.

To conclude, while Indian professionals may not have a Bar exam to pass in order to qualify them to deliver work as good as the US attorney, a Masters degree in Law more than meets the demand.

Another test that has been developed by LPOs to enable them to access the best professionals available in India, is the Global Legal Professional Certification Test, available online. http://www.glptest.com/ The test assesses a candidate’s professional, legal and technical knowledge, as well as his command over English. It also claims to test ethics. In my opinion, an in-depth interview of a prospective candidate would serve a similar purpose, but the test coulda serve to give professionals an edge, when it comes to cutting out the competition which is going to get cut-throat soon.

Nothing however, can beat the training provided by a handful of LPOs, in US and UK laws and procedures. Unfortunately, few LPOs do this. The reason could be the time consumed in such training , as also the fact that considering the rate of attrition, very often the benefits reaped could be by someone other than the trainer. But this sort of training coupled with a higher degre in law is invaluable, for LPOs seeking to develop a high-quality bank of employees to work on complicated legal projects.