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Risk Allocation in an Outsourcing Contract – the Game of Hockey

Risk allocation is rarely the impetus for entering into an outsourcing, but it is often a critical element in long term, complex outsourcing contracts, particularly where business transformation is involved. Risk allocation can be addressed in an outsourcing contract in the same traditional manner as in any commercial agreement (such as representations, warranties, limitation of liability, and so on). You rarely, if ever, see a provision in the contract that lays out the allocation of risk between the parties. 

So how exactly is all of this related to the game of hockey?

Getting to the Playoffs

The teams have lined . . . [more]

Posted in: Outsourcing

Alberta’s New Personal Information Outsourcing Requirements:  Is Anybody Paying Attention?

The Amendments

I recently had an opportunity to speak with a representative in the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Alberta in connection with Alberta’s new obligations surrounding notification and disclosure of outsourcing arrangements involving personal information. On May 1st, Alberta’s Personal Information Protection Amendment Act, 2009 amended the provincial Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA). Now, while I’m not an Alberta lawyer, it’s clear to me that the amendments impact all organizations that collect personal information from residents of Alberta. I have worked from time to time with my firm’s Alberta office when PIPA privacy issues . . . [more]

Posted in: Outsourcing

The Usefulness of the MFC Clause in Outsourcing Contracts

In outsourcing agreements, customers usually request the so-called most favoured customer (MFC) clause from their service providers. The MFC clause is a promise from the service provider to treat the customer not less favourably than its customers. The clause can take various forms but invariably it requires the service provider who offers lower charges to any other customers for the same or substantially similar services to reduce the charge of the customers. Some customers like the clause because it provides them with comfort that the charges under its outsourcing agreement will be competitive during the term of the contract. This . . . [more]

Posted in: Outsourcing

Outsourcing in the Academy

In the Chronicle of Higher Education, an article about a law professor who outsources her grading work to India. She feels that detailed feedback is key to improving writing skills, but at some 5,000,000 words each year,

Her seven teaching assistants, some of whom did not have much experience, couldn’t deliver. Their workload was staggering: About 1,000 juniors and seniors enroll in the course each year. “Our graders were great,” she says, “but they were not experts in providing feedback.”

That shortcoming led Ms. Whisenant, director of business law and ethics studies at Houston, to a novel solution last

. . . [more]
Posted in: Education & Training: Law Schools

Big Changes in Legal Outsourcing

I know this is Gavin’s beat, but the press this week has had a lot of activity in the outsourcing arena.

First news is Microsoft’s announcement today that it’s following Rio Tinto’s lead and route a fair amount of routine legal work to Gurgaon. Microsoft has been outsourcing basic intellectual property and patent maintenance to CPA Global since the mid-Noughties with around 70 CPA staff. However, this is a separate new arrangement for general legal work.

Second development goes in the other direction. CPA is inspecting sites in Northern England for its own outsourcing centre to take on 10-20 . . . [more]

Posted in: Miscellaneous

Outsourcing and Offshoring – Unplanned Consequences

Foreign ownership

In the early days of online legal research, when everything was uncertain, governments and law societies were legitimately concerned about the prospect of foreign ownership of Canadian legal information. The fear was that the legal heritage of Canada would fall into the hands of “non Canadians”, a prospect viewed with horror in many circles. While no one at that time really could foresee the future of online legal research in Canada, in retrospect, everyone should have expected that the natural “Canadian” predisposition to reconcile differences would produce a solution that would reflect everyone’s interest, offend almost no one, . . . [more]

Posted in: Legal Information, Legal Information: Libraries & Research, Legal Information: Publishing

Legal Research Outsourcing – News From India

While our India readers are doubtless aghast at the Law Commission’s bold reforms on stamp duty – you can pay any transaction/court fee by demand draft/cash/postal order/banker’s cheque instead of through non-judicial stamp papers or special stamps – and at the breakneck speed of Indian Commissions of Inquiry – less than two months for a J&K fatality inquiry, and at Stalin’s announcement of a financial city – our North American readers will be puzzling over the implications of stories in today’s Evening Standard in London and the American Lawyer in New York. . . . [more]

Posted in: Legal Information: Information Management, Practice of Law, Technology

How Outsourcing Copes With Dutch Anonymization Laws in the Production of Caselaw Databases

From last week’s Publishers’ Weekly, a good overview of how the trade publishing industry is employing Indian coders to embed .xml into works. But a paragraph on Innodata Isogen, which I thought of as doing law firm outsourcing shows just how globally linked the outsourcing of the production of legal information has become.

No KPO (knowledge processing outsourcing) project is too complex for Innodata Isogen. Take a recent job that entailed producing marketable Dutch jurisprudence information within the guidelines of European laws, which prohibit the disclosure of any information that could identify the parties involved. “The anonymization

. . . [more]
Posted in: Legal Information, Legal Information: Publishing, Substantive Law

Outsourcing in Legal Publishing – Anything (And Possibly Everything) Goes

Just over three decades ago, the Canadian Law Information Council was established by the federal and provincial governments in order to create a framework for online access to legal information in Canada. The idea was that a national council of all of the interested parties could work together to ensure that any development was in the best interest of Canadians.

At the time, there was a serious concern that online databases of Canadian legal information would be built and controlled from the United States, with the result that Canadians would have to go offshore to access their own laws in . . . [more]

Posted in: Legal Information, Legal Information: Information Management, Legal Information: Libraries & Research

Electronic Citations and Case Citators – Collaborative Outsourcing

Traditionally, a key indicator of the quality and the utility of any case citator is the breadth and depth of its coverage. The better citators purport to cover all of the cases reported in print. Law reports published by a competitor are included as a matter of course, both as an original reference and as a correlative or parallel citation.

Online databases and “electronic citations” have not been treated in the same manner. Initially electronic citations were not seen as “legitimate” citations and were considered to be unworthy of the same attention as print citations. Case citators ignored them. There . . . [more]

Posted in: Legal Information, Legal Information: Libraries & Research, Legal Information: Publishing, Substantive Law: Judicial Decisions

Legal Outsourcing – Offshore and Domestically

A recent WSL Blog posting on legal outsourcing to India (a topic covered quite extensively on SLAW), reminded me I was going to mention the panel that spoke on this topic a few weeks back at the Canadian Law and Technology Forum in Toronto. One speaker discussed offshore outsourcing and the other speaker discussed outsourcing domestically to Canadian lawyers.

The offshore outsourcing speaker was lawyer Gavin Birer of Legalwise Outsourcing Inc. (who wrote a good introductory article on the topic here on SLAW earlier this summer). Given good high-speed Internet, secure communications and a body of qualified lawyers in India, . . . [more]

Posted in: Legal Information: Information Management, Legal Information: Libraries & Research, Outsourcing

Ron Friedmann on the State of Legal Outsourcing

Ron Friedmann of Prism Legal Consulting Inc. has surveyed the current state of legal outsourcing in his fantastic article Why and What Lawyers Should Consider Outsourcing on LLRX.com (September 1, 2008).

In the article, he discusses the evolution of outsourcing in law firms and talks about outsourcing in terms of overall law firm management and cost efficiency. He summarizes the benefits, and has put together an excellent table outlining administrative and legal functions that might be outsourced by a firm. He discusses challenges HR departments face, especially with regard to maintaining the right amount of secretarial staffing, and he also . . . [more]

Posted in: Legal Information: Libraries & Research, Practice of Law