Ashurst is outsourcing its lawyers' out-of-hours support and placing 17 staff into a redundancy consultation.

A team of 34 support staff currently provide Ashurst's fee-earners with out-of-hours support, which involves typing up their dictations, amending their documents and providing conversation when they leave their room at 2am to fetch a bag of peanuts. The firm told RollOnFriday that while a London "hub" of staff would remain, an offshore provider is going to be appointed and up to half of the current team will lose their jobs. The remainder will either do the work themselves or, probably more tempting in the middle of the night, fire it off to the budget South African/Indian/Irish document farm.

One source who is up for the chop wasn't too impressed by the decision, telling RollOnFriday, "in their words: "you cost us too much". Nice."

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The move follows Ashurst's huge northshoring operation last year when it opened an office in Glasgow to carry out support work more cheaply, which led to around 110 London support staff losing their jobs.

An Ashurst spokeswoman said the model had proved successful in the firm's Australian offices, where document production work has been sent to South Africa for over a year. She said, "We will be consulting with the team in London which could unfortunately lead to some redundancies in the team. As part of the consultation process, we will explore methods for avoiding and minimising this".
 
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Comments

Anonymous 08 August 14 10:25

I know I know it business etc etc. But really? How much do these people really cost? When that's compared to absolutely huge profits, is putting a few loyal and local staff out of the job really worth it. Ths will noo doubt generate loyalty amongst everyone else, the corporate message is essentailly "we are constantly on the look out to replace you and as soon as we can we will. Now please work harder".

Utterly pathetic and I speak coming from a firm that has done exactly the same. Scum

Anonymous 08 August 14 10:33

This is the next step in the relentless and soulless drive to increase PEP. They’ll save 250k so will probably mean each partner takes home £1,200 a year more. They could just bill 2-3 more hours each.

Anonymous 08 August 14 18:30

Ashurst has been trying to improve the bottom line since the merger which is hemorrhaging.

Anonymous 09 August 14 23:39

Support staff today, associates tomorrow. Most agreements are boilerplate anyway and proofing is more important than drafting. Soon it won't just be the support staff that are being outsourced. Within the next ten years the big city firms will be more like production lines than law firms and in house will be where it's at. A few years after that most of the work you currently do will be done automatically by computer with a few specialists to check the details and one or two multi disciplinary geeks finding loopholes to buck the system.