Canadian Lawyer

tECh sUpport by danielle oloFSSon Legal farm teams Are Canadian firms missing the boat by not setting up LPOs on home soil? l ast spring, the Royal Bank of Canada came under fire for outsourcing some of its technology services. The concerns mostly focused on the loss of Canadian jobs to another jurisdiction. They did not focus on whether technology was an appropriate service to outsource. Outsourcing technology is seemingly an accepted practice, but what about legal services? Despite warnings from numerous industry watchers that some legal services must and will be outsourced to jurisdictions with a cheaper labour pool, Canadian firms have been slower to take up this option than their counterparts in the United Kingdom or America. Several reasons help to explain our reluctance to embrace legal process outsourcing. To begin with, when compared to rates charged by large London or New York firms Canadian legal fees seem low, allowing us to avoid the client scrutiny that has pushed U.S. and U.K. firms to outsource work. In addition, the Canadian economy was not affected to the same degree as Europe and the U.S. by the 2008 downturn and therefore our firms have not been under the same pressure to realize efficiencies. A second reason Canadian firms may have been slow to outsource is the role in-house counsel play in Canadian companies. According to a 2010 Deloitte survey, "An Expanding Role: Changes for Corporate Counsel — Comparing Canadian and Global Trends," Canadian companies rely on their in-house teams to look after more routine transactions and legal matters — some of the work typically outsourced — leaving the high risk or very specialized work as well as work requiring a capacity they don't have to law firms. In other words, the work www.CANADIAN L a w ye r m a g . c o m OctOber 2013 19

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