Can Business Process Management Help Foreclosure Firms Come Back Online?

As a small or medium foreclosure law firm, it can be challenging to find qualified staff to keep up with surging demand, especially when global talent shortages are at a 15-year high. Plagued by tedious back-office processes and stacked-up backlog, law firms may be looking for a cost-effective solution to productivity, and turning to talent outsourcing to prepare for the future may be an answer.

Having said that, Legal Process Outsourcing (LPO) requires tailored expertise that is often harder to staff domestically and requires a more careful hiring process regardless of location. Here, it becomes important to introduce the offshore outsourcing concept of Business Process Management (BPM) as a specialized version of LPO, specifically tailored to the legal and financial services agencies, including foreclosure law firms.

How Business Process Management Can Work for Foreclosure Law Firms

If you are new to BPM, consider working with a partner that has existing subject matter expertise from working with others in the legal and/or ARM industries. It’s quite likely the BPM provider will be ahead of most small or mid-sized law firms in operationalizing industry best practices, with a superlative level of standards and metrics. Most BPM providers have figured out the use of resources in low-cost locations, which don’t suffer labor shortages and are facile at building a strong recruiting brand that encourages high-octane hiring and retention.

Since BPM takes direct control of managing the business process, the foreclosure law firms’ operations team gets a lot of insight and analytics without getting involved in day-to-day operations. The BPM provider and the foreclosure firm can work together upfront to define standard operating procedures (SOP) with the provider left to execute the processes.

While this all may sound pretty straightforward, creating a ‘BPM Center of Excellence’ requires a degree of discipline, rigor, and standardization to achieve. Hence, it is important to ensure certain key elements are well developed when looking for a BPM provider.

Questions a Foreclosure Collections Firm Should Ask a Potential BPM Partner

It all starts with the transition from the client’s operation to the BPM provider. Externalizing process management affects multiple areas of the business. It involves the IT team, which might just be a part-time contractor, as well as the existing operations team. The important to-do is to ensure these projects must not become a time drain for the SMB owners to manage. Thus, when selecting a BPM provider, it’s useful to check how the provider handles transition management. Here are some of the questions that should be asked of the candidate provider:

  • Do they have a defined roadmap for transition?
  • Do they know how they will engage SMB owners or ops managers? Can they estimate the time demands on these valuable resources?
  • Can they show a RACI matrix or a Gantt chart with milestones?
  • Can they explain the hosting and remote access implications of moving your operations work to a remote provider?
  • How do they manage SOPs and POCs?
BPO Vs BPM

Don't Overlook Compliance Management

Compliance management is of extreme importance for heavily regulated industries, such as foreclosure, but even for the unregulated, a strong compliance culture demonstrates an ability to ensure processes are followed and client data is always secure. Some of the key questions to ask about compliance are:

  • Is the provider certified for security management processes?
  • Does the provider have established secure processes to address access to PII and other sensitive data?
  • Does the provider document its foreclosure policies and procedures? Will it be able to manage each client’s specific policies on top of general policies?
  • Does the provider keep track of policy training for its personnel?
  • How does the provider manage third-party compliance?
  • Does the provider use technology for managing the compliance of its teams? Can they provide a demonstration of their compliance management system?

If you are a foreclosure firm getting ready to scale-up your business, drop us a line. We would love to talk with you about your business needs, compliance concerns and staffing challenges.