With summer coming to an end (although the recent weather over the Bank Holiday suggests this has already happened) we can look forward with keen anticipation to what the autumn and the first half of 2011 will bring.
Incidentally, why do we all still have to suffer bank holidays? Given to bank workers in the late 19th century who did not have proper holidays, they are an outmoded concept where the state allows you to have a holiday on a given Monday when the weather is “guaranteed” to be poor and everyone else is on holiday so you cannot get anything done. Note to Coalition: Abolish bank holidays (except Christmas and Easter as these are religious festivals) and allow everyone an additional number of days of statutory holidays to be taken when we want and not just because it is ghastly Wilsonian May Day or August 31st!
Continue reading ‘Squid & cream’
Thanks to all those who responded to my recent “Legal Process Outsourcing” survey – we had a respectable response rate of around 20% and some individual feedback for which we are most grateful. Here are some preliminary conclusions -
- Of those responding, a clear majority of about 70% had not outsourced and had no experience of the process. Of the 30% who had some experience, over 80% had experienced mixed or negative aspects of the process – only one respondent said they had had an entirely positive experience.
- Of those who were thinking of outsourcing, the results were again mixed with 46% agreeing they would consider outsourcing of large disclosure exercises but 54% saying they remained to be convinced of the benefits or who had come to the conclusion that the work should not be outsourced in any circumstances.
- In response to the question about which aspects of their work they would consider outsourcing, 77% thought that they would consider outsourcing initial document review, the collection and processing of ESI and document review or aspects of their middle or back office functions.
Continue reading ‘LPO survey feedback’
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.
Continue reading ‘Life, but not as we know it’
Kim Jong IL
I make no apology for returning once again to the subject of Legal Process Outsourcing or LPO as it is colloquially known. The phenomenon is also known as Legal Services Outsourcing or LSO, making both sound like performances from the Royal Albert Hall rather than the relatively new process of instructing foreign lawyers to carry out legal tasks in a different country for a fraction of the price you would pay in this country.
LPO/LSO appears to be pretty high on the agenda of managing partners of law firms and others at present, presumably because the notion that you can use lawyers offshore to carry out tasks for a fraction of the cost of your own lawyers within the jurisdiction is irresistible in these straitened times. I am not sure what the army of paralegals and others who would have been engaged on the various tasks in this country think about it; they are surely going to be out of work if outsourcing increases, but for present purposes, I propose to leave consideration of that aspect of LPOs to one side.
Continue reading ‘You are only Jong 1200 times’
In the June 24th edition of The Economist there appeared an article entitled “Passage to India”.
This was not a reference to the E M Forster story written in the 1920s, which uses the trial of Doctor Aziz accused of raping Adela Quested on a visit to the Marabar caves to produce a trenchant commentary on the sometimes awkward relations between India and the British Raj some quarter of a century before Independence. This was a story about the growth of legal outsourcing with a subsidiary strap line proclaiming “Companies and law firms are turning to India for cut price legal services”.
Much has been written recently about the growth of legal process outsourcing and in a piece entitled A cunning plan [7th April, 2010] I mentioned that, on the back of outsourcing legal work to Indian lawyers at CPA Global thereby saving 20% of its legal costs, Rio Tinto’s general counsel Leah Cooper had jumped ship to join CPA as its strategy director.
Continue reading ‘Technophobia alive and well and living offshore’
I very much doubt that Ben Elton would find the contents of last week’s meeting of the Commercial Litigation Forum to be suitable material for an episode of Blackadder!
My brief report on the subjects raised was in my post last week entitled “Litigating in the 21st Century“. Many of you will be familiar with the themes of the final series of Blackadder with Edmund and Baldrick in the trenches with Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry’s Melchett and the wonderful “Darling” back at base. The frivolity and sheer fun is overshadowed throughout by the grim awareness of what is going to happen and a realisation that, for all their silliness, the men in the trenches are about to go over the top.
Continue reading ‘A cunning plan’
