Offshore outsourcing is almost the business strategy that dare not speak its name in legal circles. Although being able to shift all your document production, dictation transcription and even routine aspects of case management work to some developing country may mean you can take advantage of lower salary levels, a large pool of graduate-level staff and useful differences in time zones, it has always been highly contentious.

For example, is it right to work with the developing world while simultaneously creating redundancies, or at least reducing employment opportunities, in the UK? And then there is the key question of whether outsourcing actually makes any commercial sense.


It is interesting to see that according to a recently published survey by the outsourcing world's UK industry body, the National Outsourcing Agency, more than 60% of members have noticed a growing trend for 'insourcing', with organisations cancelling their out-sourcing contracts and bringing operations back in-house.


The agency said the main reasons cited were: hidden costs that reduce the financial benefit of the contract, breakdowns in the relationship between customer and outsourcer, and failure to meet agreed service levels.


This sounds similar to the anecdotal tales I hear from law firms that have tried and then abandoned outsourcing projects - typically the transcription of digital dictation - because of the poor quality of the services they receive and/or hidden costs. One firm I spoke to said the whole commercial viability of its dictation outsourcing was destroyed by the fact there were so many errors in the returned transcriptions that they had to be carefully proof-read by fee-earners, then have the mistakes corrected by in-house secretaries before being checked one final time by the lawyer and being mailed out.


But if the benefits of offshore outsourcing may be illusory, there are still two alternatives. The first is onshore outsourcing, where work is handled by typing agencies and transcription bureaux based in the UK - and in many instances employing former legal secretaries, so you avoid the language and context problems.


The second is effectively internal outsourcing, where work is handled by a firm's own staff but located in offices where the costs overheads are lower. A number of the national firms already do this successfully with, for example, secretarial services for their London offices being handled by staff in a northern office where salaries and rents are lower.


However, even smaller firms that do not have the luxury of a wider geographic spread can achieve some benefits by centralising their secretarial and administrative facilities, so their branch offices are supported centrally but manned exclusively by fee-earners.


Charles Christian is an independent adviser to the Law Society's Software Solutions guide