Will Tough Economy Push Companies to Outsource Legal Work?

From: Corporate Counsel, December 22, 2008

Martin Shively directs the worldwide IP operations of Microsoft Corp. But he doesn’t commute to the company’s campus in Redmond, Wash., every day. The associate GC works in a remote office in New Delhi, where he’s been based for 18 months overseeing not call centers, but outsourced patent work. And his operation is saving Microsoft millions on its legal bills.

Shively’s Indian experience dates back to 2004, when he took over budget responsibility for Microsoft’s patent group. There was a lot of buzz about outsourcing legal work to India; corporations like General Electric Co. were doing it, and slashing their legal bills. So Shively figured why not Microsoft? He started with the most basic task he could think of — proofreading patent applications. Instead of paying high-priced associates to do this work at a dozen U.S. law firms that drafted Microsoft’s filings, he hired one vendor in New Delhi to do them all. It was, he says, “a safe place to have a failure.” If it flopped “we just wouldn’t tell anyone,” he laughs.

But it didn’t flop. “We went there to save money,” he acknowledges. “We stayed and expanded because we liked the quality of the work.” It wasn’t just OK, it was better.

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