Friday, 27 January 2012 The agreement with Integreon is to provide "legal process outsourcing", likely to involve lower end legal work and document management. It will be interesting to see how easily Mallesons manage to integrate these processes into their work and how they deal with working with staff thousands of miles away who might not know the full details or context of the work. There will also be a need to assure clients that confidentiality regimes are sufficient. In a technical and time-critical job such as a lawyer or forensic accountant, face-to-face interaction with those you're working with is much easier than working over a distance. Not least, the ability to see that the person is actually working on the task that you think they are! Our own experience of once trying to finalise a report with team members spread across Sydney, Melbourne and Kazakhstan demonstrated to us the difficulties of a physical distance between those working on a job. There are other benefits though, such as the time difference, which may allow lawyers to clock off in the evening and return in the morning with the work done. The other interesting aspect is how the lawyers running the jobs will put the outsourcing into practice. It's one thing for a senior partner to say "we're going to use this", but it is quite another for the more junior lawyer running a job to use the services. The outsourcing supplier will need to be able to demonstrate a quality service for the lawyers on the ground to actually use it. If it works for lawyers, will it work for us? We'll have to see, but the first thought is that it would be difficult for forensic accountants to use such services because of the lack of scale on many jobs - we simply don't have a sufficient number of tasks that could be easily handed over without much direct contact to benefit from efficiencies and cost savings. Unfortunately a request for a research trip to Delhi this weekend (where coincidentally the inaugural Indian Grand Prix is happening) was declined by our management. Read the Mallesons' press release.