21 April 2010
Outsourcing legal and business research services
Foot Anstey is a reasonably sized firm (40 partners, 350 staff).
http://www.integreon.com/news-resources/press-releases/2010/foot-anstey-engages-integreon-for-library-and-information-services.html
"Foot Anstey turned to Integreon for its unique Library and Information Services offering, which includes legal and business research, journal management, information supplier management and procurement, and related library and research services. By engaging Integreon, Foot Anstey was able to expand the breadth and depth of support available to its lawyers and staff without increasing costs, ultimately enabling it to provide a higher quality, more cost-effective service to its clients.
"Through our relationship with Integreon, we have gained access to a large team of information specialists with greater breadth of expertise, depth of experience and capacity for meeting our growing information needs," said Richard Gardiner, Foot Anstey's director of business development. "Integreon provides all the support and expertise we need at an affordable price and without the administrative and management challenges."
What are your thoughts?
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Thanks Lianne, this is interesting reading. I have looked at the Integreon website to get an understanding of the breadth of legal and business research services offered as I am curious what resources Integreon are using to support legal and business research requests. I assume they are not using online commercial legal and business resources due to the licensing side of things. According to the website, Integreon state,
ReplyDelete"Our onshore research specialists have a range of practice experience and excellent online research skills. Our dedicated teams of offshore lawyers have work experience at Indian, Filipino, US or UK law firms, in corporate legal departments or in private practice. Indian and Filipino law school graduates receive extensive training using UK and US legal research tools. Integreon's legal research and drafting services include:
Primary and secondary legislation searching Case law research Large scale summation, document abstracts Journal searching Contracts review Current awareness."
I assume the service relies on free to air website sites such as Bailii.org etc. I wonder what QA processes are implemented to ensure information sourced from the Internet is accurate, authoritative and current. If a request cannot be met from free sources then does the user pay additional fees to acquire content from fee-based providers such as Dunn & Bradstreet?
Outsourcing legal and business research services might appeal to the bottom line in the short-term and may work for a small practice but how can it work, if at all, for a medium or large practice?
A recent blog post on 3 Geeks and a Law about outsourcing has attracted a number of interesting comments from people who have been involved in outsourced library arrangments. http://www.geeklawblog.com/2010/04/outsourced-library-info-services-bad.html
ReplyDeleteThere has also been the most recent article on Cameron McKenna's outsourcing to Integreon. http://www.legalweek.com/legal-week/news/1648461/camerons-signs-deal-integreon-outsource-support-staff
ReplyDeleteWhilst Australian law firms are a bit removed and a different scale to the UK, it seems logical that in time the outsourcing options will be explored in Australia. My thought is that an outsourcing agent managing the library functions (such as acquisitions and subscriptions management) from a number of large firms would be in a good position to negotiate effectively with the various publishers.
I enjoyed reading this, too!
ReplyDeleteVery interesting. I was looking for some info about Outsourcing customer support, I wanted to know more about it. So thanks for sharing :)
Dear Naish,
ReplyDeleteWe read your blog The Australian Law Librarians’ Association Blog and I found the post, regarding the outsourcing of legal and business research very interesting. I haven’t seen it in Australia yet, even in the big sort of firms. We are currently developing a legal database, known as Jade (Judgments and Decisions Enhanced) at www.jade.barnet.com.au which is part of our OpenLaw initiative that seeks to provide free high-quality case law database services to legal practitioners all over Australia. We would love to get your feedback on our site. David Whelan, who blogs for Finding Legal Information in Canada says that we are the “site that gets it right” and this article can be found at http://fli.canadalawbook.ca/2010/05/21/free-australian-case-law-site-gets-it-right/
Some of our great features include:
1. Bookmarking - Through Jade you can mark and annotate useful cases and chose to be notified by email when new decisions relevant to your practice or interest arrive in Jade.
2. CaseTrace - Our most recent development is CaseTrace, which allows you to see paragraph-level, snapshot displays of cases that cite the case you are viewing. This allows you to keep track of the most recent developments in important legal principles, in a highly intuitive and simple display.
If you would like to know more about our other features please have a look at our blog: http://jadeful.wordpress.com/. We think that Jade is a really great website and we hope you like it too.
Kind Regards,
Si Qi Wen
JADE Support
+61 2 8815 9081 JADE Support
jade@barnet.com.au
www.jade.barnet.com.au (JADE Website)