The NelsonHall Vendor Evaluation and Assessment Tool (NEAT) for LPO is now available to NelsonHall clients, and is also available for a period free-of-charge to buy-side organizations through NelsonHall and through its partners SIG and SSON.

The tool supports a number of potential LPO requirements specifically addressing the needs of organizations with, for example, strong requirements for contract standardization, legal cost reduction, legal process reengineering, and risk management.

Suppliers of LPO services covered by this NelsonHall Vendor Evaluation and Assessment Tool (NEAT) include Capgemini, Capita, Clutch Group, Cobra Legal Solutions, Exigent, Infosys, Integreon, LegalBase, Mindcrest, NewGalexy, Quislex, and WNS Global Services.

The NelsonHall Vendor Evaluation and Assessment tool for legal process outsourcing is part of NelsonHall's "speed-to-source" initiative. The NEAT tool sits at the front-end of the vendor screening process and consists of a two-axis model: assessing vendors against their "ability to deliver immediate benefit" to buy-side organisations and their "ability to deliver innovation in support of client-specific requirements".

Vendors are scored against a wide range of criteria, establishing a number of scenarios, each representing a different business situation or client business need.

To add further value in applying the NelsonHall analysis, buy-side organizations can input their own weightings and tailor the LPO NEAT tool to their requirements against 29 individual vendor evaluation criteria. So, for example, a sourcing manager might decide that the weightings for legal cost reduction are not quite in line with their company's requirements, and that they would like to place more emphasis on legal compliance and risk management, or on U.S. LPO delivery capability. By changing the weightings using the NEAT interactive web tool, sourcing managers can tailor the vendor evaluation criteria to generate a bespoke view of how the vendors compare against one another.