Sun Microsystems Legal Outsourcing Approach

Introduction

Connie Brenton, Assistant General Counsel for Sun Microsystems recently presented at the IAOP Legal Outsourcing Chapter's second session. She presented Sun's approach to legal outsourcing and how they actualized real benefits through their foray

Findings

Some key points from her presentation were:

• They started in 2005. From then to now, there has been a marked difference in how the market and talent pool has matured
• They did not just assign a project and wait for results. They provided a project manager, training, templates, assessed the cost of completing the assignment completely onshore and set a target for their savings margin they needed to achieve to make this effort worthwhile
• They used an innovative methods to evaluate the offshore bidders for the project and did not base it solely on price. They did not pick the lowest bid
• They use multiple offshore vendors so as to minimize their dependence on just one provider
• To quote Connie, their cost savings and benefit from using an offshore vendor to complete their project was wildly successful.

Recommendations

Some of our own recommendations to add to the above are:

• look for sufficient onshore support while rolling projects out. A blended model of onshore/ offshore resources works best
• run pilots to asses the complexity and scope of projects before assigning any expectations
• not all types of legal work can or should be offshored
• look for the cost savings as a percentage of the onshore spend
  

Conclusion

In conclusion, legal outsourcing is a tried and tested method to manage some of corporate counsel's spend on outside counsel. It's time corporate counsel start to leverage its advantages