Several articles in June cover outsourcing, both in the corporate and legal sectors. My perhaps biased take is that they suggest a continued up tick in legal outsourcing.
Seven Myths About Outsourcing (Wall Street Journal, 6/16/07, $) reports “companies that think handing off an operation to an overseas provider is easy can get a rude awakening.” To avoid that rude awakening, it reviews seven myths and steps to overcome them:
1. We Can Have It All
2. Outsourcing Services is Like Buying Commodities
3. We Need an Ironclad Contract
4. Contracts Don’t Matter
5. Vendors Are Insurance Companies
6. It’s Not Our Headache Anymore
7. Our First Failure Should Be Our Last Attempt
There’s good advice here for law firms or law departments considering outsourcing.
Karen Asner, the White & Case administrative partner, wrote How Law Firms Can Achieve Optimal Procurement (law.com, 6/20/07). She concludes “Procurement is more than just saving dollars and cents. It is a strategic function that can help each group, and your firm as a whole, work more efficiently to achieve your business objectives.” It’s a good read but I was surprised not see any mention of outsourcing as an element of a procurement strategy.
Meanwhile, British firms seem to view outsourcing as part of their procurement strategy. Another big British law firm recently announced that it is outsourcing IT. Eversheds outsourcing deal to cost cool £27m (Legal Week, 6/6/07) reports that the ” top 10 UK firm will transfer 79 professional staff as part of the deal, which covers various core support functions including the help desk, network, infrastructure teams and its IT training specialists.” The article also reports that Linklaters has outsourced “support and maintenance of the firm’s global data centre and infrastructure.” For details on Eversheds outsourcing, see an Orange Rag blog post. It quotes the IT Director, who says the deal will enable the IT department to “deliver leading-edge business solutions that benefit our people and clients”
With outsourcing virtually old hat in the corporate sector and more and more law firms thinking about procurement, it seems likely that we will see more instances of legal process outsourcing.
Update (10/20/07): It turns out White & Case does outsource. See my post What Direction Legal Outsourcing?