A New Balance

An excerpt taken from an article, taken from Legal Week, a UK based publication for UK lawyes, discusses a subject that corporate counsel in the US can relate to: the drive to cut legal costs, often times by legal departments taking on increasingly more work without going to outside counsel. Outsourcing routine legal work, as the article mentions, can help legal departmets control legal costs without giving up control to outside counsel. Case in point--Accenture UK, which has a captive off-shore in the Mauritius Islands.

Author: Ed ThorntonSource: Legal DirectorStart Date: 19/01/2006End Date: 16/02/2006

Law In Business: Law firms take note: in-house legal teams are taking on more and more work themselves, at the expense of their general advisers. Specialist external advice will remain in demand, but corporate counsel are confident of taking on major deals without law firms holding their hand. Ed Thornton reports

When BOC Group and Marks & Spencer (M&S) sealed a £1bn outsourcing contract in November, outside counsel were strangely absent from the line-up of key players. This was surprising, given that the deal was described by the two FTSE 100 companies as one of the largest food distribution contracts in the UK, seeing BOC deliver food to approximately 420 M&S stores until 2011. The BOC team was led by senior counsel Andrew Brackfield, an ex-Linklaters corporate partner, who worked alongside associate counsel Robert Breedon. Meanwhile, in-house lawyer Carolyn Lock led the M&S team. While Stevens & Bolton advised BOC on some property aspects of the deal, this was a deal where outside counsel played second fiddle to the in-house legal team, at best. Adrian Thurston, head of legal at MFI, thinks this may be symptomatic of a wider trend. "There is an ongoing realisation that it can be cost-effective to do work internally," he says. "[But] even well-stocked departments do not have the back-up of resources for a deal like that [that a law firm would have]. I expect it was quite a challenge." Nonetheless, with a legal department of 40 lawyers worldwide, BOC was convinced it had the resources and expertise to manage the deal in house — particularly since outsourcing was one of its strengths. "As business lawyers, we aim to know the business really well and provide a service," says Brackfield. "Economically, it makes sense to do as much in house [as possible]." . ........
Accenture’s 30-strong UK legal department found a creative way to control legal costs and bring Nevertheless, the trend among corporate legal departments to retain a greater volume and quality of work in house should cause law firms to take notice. In-house lawyers appear to be increasingly eager to try their hand at complex deal work sometimes thought to be the preserve of private practice specialists. At the same time, the Accenture example shows that the routine, day-to-day work can be outsourced further afield than the City.
Author: Ed ThorntonSource: Legal DirectorStart Date: 19/01/2006End Date: 16/02/2006