Legal services provider QuisLex has been offering litigation and corporate support services since 2004. I come across it because of its litigation support services focused on document review and related aspects of electronic discovery, but it also offers a range of other services to corporate legal departments, including contract management, the creation and implementation of compliance programs, and services relating to M&A and corporate restructuring.

Increasingly, QuisLex’s business has been emanating from clients in the UK, and the time has come for it to open an office in London which it did earlier this year, with Umar Yasin (whom I know from his previous work in eDiscovery) as the first London recruit. My introduction to the company was through Andrew Goodman, with whom I have attended events and shared platforms in various countries.

The task is to build on the business relationships which QuisLex has already with very large firms and companies, and to bring the same level and quality of service to a wider range of clients and matters.

Almost all of QuisLex’s work is currently done offshore, with a large managed document review centre in Hyderabad. This is not just a place where bodies are hired to tick boxes; QuisLex has over 1,000 full-time lawyers on its books, some of whom have been with the company since it began 11 years ago. The lawyers are supported by a legal technology group and dedicated quality assurance teams. The company is technology agnostic, used to dealing with technology from kCura, Epiq Systems, Xerox Litigation Services, Recommind, FTI and Kroll.

QuisLex’s particular skill is the development of processes, both its own and those needed by clients. This highly professional approach challenges the general perception of offshore services, which vary considerably both as to quality and as to their ability to handle complex projects. The QuisLex Hyderabad operation is structured in a way which is equivalent to a high-end law firm, with the ability to apply 200 to 300 people to a project at short notice in response, for example, to a dawn raid. Using their own resources, they can apply a large team to a project in as little as 24 to 48 hours. Given this capability it is not surprising that they handle a large portfolio of competition-related matters in the UK, EU and particularly in the US, where QuisLex on average has been involved on over 10% of the HSR Second Requests in a given year.

QuisLex’s strength lies not just in scalability or in the quantity of documents it can handle. It can cope also with the complexity of matters which might have 200 specific issues needing managed review on an issue basis. Relatively few cases require this level of sophistication, but it is easier for QuisLex to apply their teams and processes to smaller matters than it is for most of its rivals to scale up.

Among the challenges in eDiscovery is dealing with privacy and data protection problems which similarly vary between jurisdictions. Data is not exported to Hyderabad but is held either by the law firm or the clients, and is protected by a range of other controls both technical and legal.

I look forward to finding out more about the London operation and to working with Umar Yasin and others to help develop its practice.

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