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30 November 2006
Your recent article on the furore surrounding whether law firms can save costs and increase efficiency through offshore legal processing outsourcing (Law Society Gazette, 26 October 2006) was intriguing, but missed a central point - will clients be happy with it?
Both the Clementi Report and anecdotal evidence attest that UK law firms, though improving, have had major difficulties getting to grips with customer service culture. Furthermore, anyone who has rung directory enquiries recently will have come across the shortcomings of offshore outsourcing, in terms of it being good for cost-cutting but bad for service.
This makes the wisdom behind sending legal work abroad, however commoditised it may be, look shaky if the profession is to improve its reputation for customer services.
Sending sensitive information abroad comes with other risks. In the case of India, even its own legal profession is concerned by the country’s inability to deal with data theft, highlighted by a number of recent fraud cases involving outsourced financial services workers. Another critical point made in the article was that outsourcing legal work abroad would result in significant cost and time savings for busy firms. There is a case for this, but an equally strong case for looking again at how firms can streamline the support functions that underpin their businesses.
Before firms take the potentially risky step of sending work to places where it appears cheaper but comes with a hidden price, perhaps they would do better to look at their existing operations first
Richard Bate General Manager Voicepath
