Date: April 12, 2013 Topic: The Shrinking ... - Georgetown Law

General Counsel with Power? 2011
Chapter 5: What Lawyers Do in a World of Multi-sourcing
Once legal work is disaggregated into constituent tasks, the in-­‐house legal department must consider
the most efficient and effective way of sourcing each task. In the last several years, the portfolio of
possible sources of legal service has expanded – hence the notion of multi-­‐sourcing – as new providers
and new locations have become available. Up until recently, the only thick pipeline of legal advisory
work that mattered was the one connecting the corporation to the law firm. Whilst this will continue to
be important, the corporation now has a diverse set of sourcing options, ranging from (i) offshoring a
captive in-­‐house legal department (as GE had done); (ii) relying on law firms to set up a captive low-­‐cost
centre (as Clifford Chance or Baker & McKenzie have done); (iii) sourcing from contract lawyers on a
project-­‐by-­‐project basis; to (iv) going direct to new legal services providers that have a global presence
(as Rio Tinto did with CPA Global) (see Figure 5). Despite these emergent models for sourcing legal
services, the offshore legal process outsourcing (LPO) sector remains a mere drop in the ocean, around
$500 million in revenue, or 0.1% of the worldwide legal market worth around $500 billion in 2010
(Datamonitor, 2010).
Figure 5: Global value chain in legal services
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Said Business School | University of Oxford