Response to 'The Outsourcing Guide' article (Legal Week 24.01.2008)

29 January 2008

Anyone who has experienced an overseas call centre recently will have come across the shortcomings of offshore outsourcing, in terms of it being good for cost-cutting but bad for customer service.

This makes the concept of sending legal work abroad, however commoditised it may be, look shaky, particularly if the legal profession is to improve its well-publicised reputation for customer service. My company retains an experienced team of trained legal typists all based in the UK and many of our customers have switched to us following negative experiences with offshore outsourcing. Solicitors Vizards Tweedie selected an offshore outsourced transcription company as its principal supplier but soon found the service had limitations. A spokesperson from Vizards told us: "While there was a minimal time difference, we found that cultural factors still had an impact on the quality of transcriptions we received. Little things like typists not being able to spell 'Piccadilly' proved annoying, especially when we had paid the supplier a premium to give each document a second proofreading. More significantly, we also encountered a certain amount of internal resistance from fee earners, who had ethical reservations about sending work abroad. They felt that such work should be retained in the UK." Consequently, Vizards began looking into the transcription options available closer to home and now employs our 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 the same savings being made by outsourcing within the UK. 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 onshore outsourcing options first?

Posted by: Richard Bate, Voicepath on 29 Jan 2008