Tag Archives: insourcing

Dines with dinosaurs

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On 12th March 1829 undergraduates at the University of Cambridge sent a challenge to their counterparts at Oxford and started a tradition which continues in more or less the same form to this day.

If you missed it last Saturday, imagine 16 heavy athletic men, plus a smaller man and a girl, afloat on the Thames in two boats so flimsy that the slightest mistake will result in thousands of pounds worth of boat having a large hole in the hull and everyone getting rather wetter than they had hoped or in the case of the winning crew’s cox, as wet as he knew he would become once the race was over.

The 157th Oxford v Cambridge Boat Race was rowed in near perfect conditions and Oxford’s impressive win means that they have now won 76 times to Cambridge’s 80 (one race was a dead heat). This is significant, because if you are an Oxford man, as I am, you have spent all your life seeing Cambridge’s once commanding lead in the overall statistics dwindle to almost parity. Dare I dream that in the not too distant future Oxford will overtake their rivals in the total number of wins? If so, I will have to make a real effort to attend a Dinosaurs’ Dinner again; for those unfamiliar with the Dinosaurs it has nothing to do with prehistoric times and everything to do with eating and drinking too much at my old college where the rowers’ dining club is called the Dinosaurs!

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The hokey cokey

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You put your left leg in
You put your left leg out
In, out, in, out
Shake it all about
You do the Hokey Cokey and you turn around
That’s what it’s all about.

First there was outsourcing. You know what I mean. Legal Process Outsourcing (LPO) in exotic places like the Philippines, South Africa, Sri Lanka and India.

Then there was insourcing. Something of a Millnet idea but more of the Smart Insourcing team in a moment.

Now there is Near Shoring.

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The face that launched a thousand quips

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A young man, about to leave his current employer and embark on a new career, posed an interesting question last weekend. As a result, the assembled company, duly fortified with a large jug of pre-prandial Bloody Mary, spent some time considering who owns an employee’s LinkedIn contact network, doubtless compiled with the knowledge and encouragement of the employer and in the employer’s time, when the employee decides to move to pastures new.

Leaving aside express provisions in the contract of employment, the “legal” view was that, in all probability, the employer owned the network on the basis that it is generally accepted that work created during employment belongs to the employer and not the employee who created it.

The “other” view was that, if that were the case, the law lagged behind the reality of modern usage of social networking sites such as FaceBook and MySpace. These sites are in the public domain (subject to password protection in the main) and the courts, at any rate in the US, have tended to agree that the contents of such sites are not confidential and are potentially disclosable in litigation. (See Macmillan v Hummingbird Speedway Inc.) It seems to me that that view presupposes that the networks created are the property of the individual and not that of their employer.

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All in a day’s work

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In the few weeks since its launch, the Millnet Smart Insourcing service has proved to be highly popular. In fact, so popular, that we’ve taken on three new graduate team members to cope with the workload.

The pool of expertise available within the team is growing all the time and with the increase in manpower, we are able to take on more or less the whole spectrum of litigation support work.

A notable example on which the team is currently working, involves a time-sensitive review and summary of in excess of  35,000 documents and inserting an accurate descriptive field as part of an objective coding exercise.

We’ve also taken on a wide variety of work, typically at short notice and with very tight deadlines. Here are a few examples:

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Hope springs internal

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Millnet’s recent launch of its Smart Insourcing project comes as a morsel of good news amidst the general doom and gloom concerning employment prospects for new law graduates. We asked interns Carolyn Morgan, Chelsea Parkin and Natalia van der Velde for their first hand assessment.

We have heard it said that Legal Practice Course (LPC) students and graduates who have not yet managed to secure a training contract have only themselves to blame; they have been lazy and quite simply not made the effort to find one! We have also heard of individuals making 200 plus applications before successfully finding that elusive training contract. Is it the quality of the individual, lack of training contracts available, or fiercer competition faced by this year’s graduates that has made the process of finding a training contract that much harder in 2010?

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Snowman theft armless say police

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One of the best loved stories of recent years is Raymond Briggs’ The Snowman with its music by Howard Blake. In case you are not familiar with the story (and surely everyone has heard the main theme tune Walking in the Air) it concerns a little boy who makes a snowman one day. Unable to sleep he decides to check on the snowman in the night and finds it has come to life. They have a number of adventures together before returning to the garden of the house where the boy lives.

We have all had to get used to a snowy theme in the past week or so. Tales abound of difficulties encountered by this person and that but I wonder if you heard the story of the woman who dialled 999 and explained to the switchboard operator that her snowman had gone missing?

“I went out to have a fag,” she said, “and he’s gone.”

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Is there life after outsourcing?

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We’ve heard it said (and we’ve said it ourselves often enough) that the next big thing after outsourcing is going to be… insourcing. It will probably also come as no surprise that our version of it is called smart insourcing.

What is smart insourcing? Simply put, smart insourcing allows law firms to draw upon a pool of local paralegal talent as if it were an extension of their own in-house paralegal team.

Document review, in particular, is one of those requirements that tends to come up at short notice and with a degree of urgency that can place a serious strain on a law firm’s own resources. Millnet Smart Insourcing allows law firms to augment their in-house capability, using local resources, at times of the greatest need.

Why have we done it?

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Squaring the circle

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Former Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, once quipped that a week was a long time in politics. After a string of events which were calculated to make a lesser man blanch, Wilson was phlegmatic. He had spent most of his life climbing the greasy pole which is politics and he obviously felt that he needed to present an unconcerned mien to the public whatever the difficulties he or his Government faced at the time. His predecessor but one, Harold Macmillan was less phlegmatic and more laconic. When asked what was the greatest challenge facing a statesman, he replied: “Events, dear boy, events.”

Consider, however, how much more frightening than a mere week must have been the predicament of “Los 33” at the start of their ordeal. In the end they were all safely rescued after 69 days but 10 weeks must have seemed like an eternity to them at the outset and the original prediction that they would not be rescued until Christmas must have caused an agony of despair unknown to a politician.

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Life, but not as we know it

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Some of us knew it already. Others denied it. Still more did not want to know about it and others closed their minds to it.

I am not talking about Legal Process Outsourcing, nor Smart e-Discovery. I am talking about a report I first heard early last Thursday morning on the Today programme about the discovery of more than 70 flint tools and chips unearthed in Happisburgh on the North East coast of Norfolk.

Happisburgh (hands up all of you who thought it was called Happy’s Berg, when it should be pronounced Hazeboro’!!) is a small village on the coast of Norfolk between Cromer and Great Yarmouth. Until last week it was remarkable for little more than a red and white painted lighthouse, a nearby garden owned and cultivated by one Alan Gray and a propensity for its houses nearest to the sea to fall off the cliffs into the waves below, a phenomenon common enough on the east coast of England and one which arouses huge controversy every time someone suggests that it would be a better use of taxpayers’ money NOT to shore up the ever crumbling cliffs against the encroaching sea but to pay proper compensation to the house owners to enable them to move elsewhere.

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