Posted by Chris MacNaughton on Mon, Jan 11, 2010
The offshore transcription offers come flooding in, promising professional legal transcription services at the fraction of the cost that you are used to paying. But should you use an offshore transcription company? While the cost savings are certainly attractive, outsourcing your legal transcription projects and placing your trust in a company located on the other side of the global has its pitfalls. Before you agree to an offshore transcription arrangement consider the downsides including lack of control over your data's integrity and security, language barriers, reliability, accuracy, and accountability.
Whenever you release data, its integrity is at risk. What types of internal controls and security measures has the offshore legal transcription service put in place to ensure that your confidential data remains uncompromised? How is the data transmitted to and from the transcriber? Is it encrypted? Are the transcription company's computers secure? What is the transcription company's privacy policy? Does the service handle the transcriptions in a secure facility or does it use work-at-home transcribers? These are but a few of the many questions that you must be concerned with when you outsource transcription, whether the transcriber is located across the street or in another continent. While an offshore legal transcription company may have a professional looking Web site with professional looking photos, unless you can visit the facilities in person, verification is difficult.
Language barriers are also of concern. The English language with all of its nuances is difficult enough for non-native speakers to master and transcribe accurately. Add in complex legal terms and the potential for transcription errors grows. Even if the final transcribed product is technically acceptable, language barriers can lead to other misunderstandings such as expectations and due dates.
Closely related is the issue of accuracy. How accurate are the transcription services offered? Will your final documents be free of errors or will you need to spend additional time correcting errors?
What about ethics? Are the offshore stenographers certified as legal transcribers or court reporters? Do they adhere to a code of ethics comparable to the same ethical standards expected of onshore transcribers?
A good legal transcription service, local or otherwise, must be reliable and accurate as well as secure and dedicated to protecting the integrity and confidentiality of your data. You need to know that the job will be done promptly, correctly, accurately, and on time - every time. Will an offshore legal transcription company be as reliable as a local one? Possibly. However, it's important to understand how the service you are considering operates. Is the service a small company with one or two transcribers? Is it a large company, operating much like a call center with hundreds of transcribers working on projects as they come in? If multiple transcribers are involved, will your law office be assigned its own transcriber? Can you request transcribers that have performed well for you in the past?
Finally, what happens when a problem occurs? Will you get the runaround or will the company step up and be accountable? What mechanisms are in place to confirm that your data has been received and is being processed? How will you be informed if there's a delay, or worse, a security breach?
While many of these same considerations exist when hiring a local legal transcriptionist, distance and language barriers tend to magnify the issues. Privacy laws and ethical standards also vary from one country to the next, making the question of security, confidentiality, and data integrity a major consideration.