A survey jointly conducted by the Law Society, the U.K. equivalent of the ABA, and NewGalaxy Partners, a London-based legal outsourcing firm, collected responses from 52 British corporate counsel. Some of them completed an online survey and some gave telephone interviews, which is a methodological twist. That is not the point of this post, however.
Somewhat less than one in five of the 52 law departments (17%) reported that their companies send some legal work abroad and only a handful more expected their companies to be offshoring in the next two years.
Oddly, though, 31 percent of the respondents predicted that “most large corporations will offshore within five years, and 44 percent suggested that international law firms will also establish their own units abroad.”
Managers in law departments have different notions of what offshoring means and what kinds of services fit the opportunity. Meanwhile, this group sees the heyday of offshoring still some years away (See my post of Jan. 18, 2009: 15 blogs on legal process offshoring; and Feb. 7, 2009: CFO data on frequency of offshoring.).