Joy London (of excited utterances) and I have updated our outsourced and offshore legal service list. This update (the last one was in October) includes 10 new vendors and 1 dropped one. We have also noticed a couple of other trends.
One is that more Indian companies now list a US presence. Based on our own experience working in the US legal market, that is clearly a good strategy. Law firms are definitely more comfortable if there is a domestic presence.
The other trend is that the services provided by vendors seem to change regularly. Since we rely only on public sources (websites or articles), we don’t know if this reflects actual changes in service offering or just changes in what vendors actively promote.
We have not quantified these two trends, but based on checking web sites for each update and editing our table, the trend is clear.
In other recent outsourcing, news, several UK law firms are actively considering their outsourcing options. An article in Legal Week (11/2/06, UK) reports: CMS Cameron McKenna is exploring moving back-office functions to India; SJ Berwin is considering outsourcing; and Linklaters has inked a deal with Perot Systems. Perot will do some work for Linklaters onsite and some offshore. “Perot will initially work on developing the firm’s know-how systems.” It will be interesting to see how this deal affects knowledge management. On the one hand, from a KM professional’s perspective, this could be good news if more resources will be available to support the IT aspects of KM. On the other hand, who knows!