Law Department Management Blog
Ron Friedman attended the ACI Legal Process Outsourcing conference on January 17th in New York City. He posted on his blog the comments of Donna Webber, Chief Counsel, CIT Capital Markets, who was speaking about the experience of CIT in using Indian legal service providers.
”Law department headcount was frozen but we had new tasks we had to do. So outsourcing was natural to evaluate. But American lawyers are innately skeptical of lawyers elsewhere to do the work. When we first approached offshoring, we were skeptical. When we saw quality, we were relieved. Given the offshore savings, making the decision was easy.
All of our NDA for deals are drafted and/or reviewed by offshore lawyers. We found that inhouse counsel spent inordinate amounts of time doing this. We developed extensive guidelines on provisions to include and how much we were willing to bend. We provided this detailed guidance to offshore lawyers. So far, our business clients are very happy.
The other offshore project is to conduct surveillance of e-mail. They sort out junk from 500 to 600 e-mails a day so that fewer need review in-house.”
The new function for me in this pair is surveillance of email.