Historically, outsourcing has found little favour with law firms and the UK market has been particularly tough for providers to crack. The legal sector is somewhat out of step with other industry sectors in this regard. In the boom years, when IT budgets were often lavish and technology as a whole was seen by many firms as a means of gaining competitive advantage, this is easy to understand. If the key focus is on strategic development rather than cost management, it makes no sense to use external resources that rely on establishing economies of scale by servicing a number of rival law firms.
But since then a few things have changed. Law firms’ profitability is now under threat and the prospective outsourcers have moved with the times, focusing less on running IT departments for law firms – never a popular proposition. Rather, they are now talking about ‘managed services’, which leave the client in the driving seat to some extent.
