Offshore staffing in law firms, why it hasn't worked for us
Not a day passes…
Where I am not offered unsolicited offshore staffing solutions.
Is it just me?
These come in the form of multiple unsolicited messages on both LinkedIn and emails AND I am serious when I say it is every single day.
If that is how you run your business, good luck to you!
Even if you employ offshore, fine, your business - your choice but I must admit I don’t think it works well, certainly for complex legal work - I don’t think it provides great staff and client interactions.
By the way, I’m not against it as a solution per se. I’m open to any method of delivering services that provides better value for our clients, supports our people and is legally sound. But I have just not found it to work.
But I am also proudly employing Australian staff located at our office in Melbourne and in the case of paralegal staff training local law students who want a career as lawyers.
Heck, if firms like ours don’t train them - who will?
It certainly isn’t the law schools, where the practical knowledge they leave there with is…or the PLT courses - making lawyers practice ready, I don’t think so!
So, to the extent the goal of offshore is to save money / raise efficiency and quality - I haven’t seen that you get it.
Plus we provide a premium service and to be honest a litigation lawyer must, there are no prizes for second place. Speed of turnaround, quality of communication and accuracy are key…
And I am not forming these views without basis, I have tried using offshore staff, materially we made the decision some years ago just after Covid to support our lawyers and test it out and it didn’t function well.
I found challenges with interacting online and the inability to have direct client engagement were key issues. The support for our lawyers was limited…
I still believe it is necessary for all staff including administration staff to be great communicators both oral and written. In a service business like ours nothing is more important than that and efficiency.
I’m not here dissing the whole model but hopefully maybe some BDM’s that sell offshore staffing read this and give my inbox a break!
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