An internal team of offshore legal professionals wasn’t the way to go for British Telecomm

Speaking at the Datacert conference, Generals of the Revolution, last week, Richard Susskind, the author of The End Of Lawyers? Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services (Oxford 2008), referred to an interesting event. British Telecomm assembled its own team of lawyers and others in India to provide LPO services. Without mentioning why, Susskind then said that BT eventually transferred that group to United Lex, one of the leading LPO firms.

That is not surprising, since even the largest legal group would find it hard to sustain and manage an offshore legal function. Service providers who concentrate their attention and resources on that capability will surpass the performance of the captive team (See my post of Sept. 21, 2009: more detail on the Rio Tinto deal with CPA Global.).