Attention lenders: If you’re still hiring an outside firm to manage your collections litigation, you are spending money on a service that is making your operations less efficient. You’ll be able to increase recoveries while expending less effort if you coordinate your collections law firms in-house.
To be sure, anyone who’s been in this business for a while knows this wasn’t always true. Back when paper documents held sway, creditors hired outsourcers to escape the tedious and costly work of forwarding account files to local law firms and keeping track of their progress.
Today, paper has been replaced by cloud computing (or should have been). And the government now requires creditors to monitor the law firms collecting debt on their behalf, ensuring that they comply with strict regulation.
In this environment, outsourcing collections litigation is no longer the most efficient recovery method. Here are just six of the pain points caused by litigation outsourcing:
- Disjointed workflows. Many outsourcers use multiple software systems (often emailing documents, too) throughout the collections litigation process, instead of a single streamlined system.
- Manual document creation. Attorneys hired by outsourcers often create legal filings in Microsoft Word, after gathering supporting information from multiple systems. Data duplication leads to increased risk of errors.
- Inefficient information exchange. Law firms need facts and documents to support the validity of the creditor’s claims. Eventually, they will need an official of the creditor to sign an affidavit attesting to the claim’s veracity. Typically, outsourcers handle this information exchange through email, delaying collections while creating manual work flows for the creditor.
- Insufficient audit support. The systems used by most outsourcers are designed to keep track of groups of files that are forwarded as a package to law firms. They typically can’t provide the real-time details of individual accounts the creditor needs to supervise and audit compliance.
- Costly fees. Aside from the legal fees involved, outsourcers pocket 4%-7% of all recoveries.
- Heavier workloads for attorneys. Collections lawyers engaged by outsourcers must attend to time-consuming clerical tasks. This busy work leads law firms to ask for higher contingency fees than they would need with a more efficient (and less error-prone) process.
Today a creditor can solve all these problems by using modern cloud-based technology that enables them to manage their collections litigation in house more efficiently than through master servicers. Specifically:
- State of the art workflow management systems allow creditors to store collections data in a single repository for smoother workflows.
- Documents are automatically assembled without draining clerical processes.
- Compliance is simplified, since the system is centralized and disallows debtor-contact that would violate regulations.
- The administratives costs involved are typically well below those charged by outsourcers.
Best of all, the enhanced efficiencies mean improved productivity, increased volume, lower legal fees, and ultimately, higher returns.
For a comparison of creditor-managed collection litigation to outsourced litigation management, you can download our QuickStudy, “The risk of outsourcing collections litigation: How centralized control can prevent compliance violations and increase recoveries at the same time.”
Share this: