Pinsent Masons boosts outsourcing trend with Krakow deal
City firm Pinsent Masons has become the latest law practice to outsource key services by sending documents to be reviewed in Poland.
The firm used Capita’s outsourced legal services operation in Krakow to review aspects of a large dispute.
Both parties had agreed on a number of matters covered by the documents, meaning that a significant amount of data was no longer relevant, whilst some information was still privileged.
The firm chose Capita’s purpose-built, 550-seat operation in central Krakow, where reviewers catalogued a total of 1.6m documents. Capita said that the legal process outsourcing operation, which opened in 2011, has 85 fee-earners recruited in Krakow.
James Cowan, head of legal services outsourcing at Capita, said: ‘In the midst of a recession and at an increasingly litigious time, law firms are facing downward cost pressures along with demands to increase their value contribution to litigation case management.’
Last week magic circle firm Allen & Overy announced the outsourcing of 67 back-office jobs to Belfast from offices in the US and continental Europe.
The firm has announced its intention to employ 300 staff in Northern Ireland by next year.
City firm Herbert Smith opened a Belfast office in April 2011 for a mixture of qualified lawyers and legal assistants. The firm has also looked to use its Belfast document review centre for cases from the Freehills side of its business.
Last October, insurance firm Keoghs announced a three-year partnership with IT services provider Steria to overhaul its infrastructure. The decision was made to save costs and improve productivity.
Comments
Assuming that the case is
Assuming that the case is based in England not Poland.....
And what was the clients' view of having their documentation reviewed by some legally unqualified Poles without supervision from a Pinsents' partner?
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Presumably the clients' express consent was sought - but no disclaimers were required from the clients....
How does this help to prevent
How does this help to prevent failings on the part of practitioners who simply don't take the time to study the documentary evidence in civil cases, causing delays and additional costs. As we all know, "The devil is in the detail". This is too important an area to be outsourced.
Bit strange
I find this all a bit strange. I can see why a firm might want to outsource general admin, like scanning, data-inputting, and maybe even typing, but if you get somebody else to review documents how do you know that they know what to look out for? I assume the point of it was to extract irrelevant information and summarise the relevant, to make the consideration of evidence more manageable, but If the people doing that have not been involved in the dispute as an actual representative then how do they know what is and is not relevant? What if there is something buried within an email which blows the case, or wins it? I cannot imagine having to defend that professional negligence claim ("Let me get this straight, you sent truckloads of evidence to Poland so that you did not have to pay your own staff to read it, and now you are saying it is not your fault that it all went wrong?").
If the person doing the reviewing has to be sufficiently legally qualified to be able to understand the dispute and what is needed in the first place, then you have effectively employed a foreign fee-earner to do your work cheaper than your own fee-earners. That is a fairly worrying trend for fee-earners in this country and I hope it is not an omen for the future.
Yes, of course it is an omen
Yes, of course it is an omen for the future.
Not only will the work be done by cheaper labour, it will be done by unqualified labour.
But the whole point of the Clementi reforms were to "deskill" law to make it cheaper for the consumer.
Outsource
I hope the SRA & the Law Society are taking note, perhaps we can have some more "outcomes focused regulations" to regulate outsourcing.