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."
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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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."
An Ashurst lawyer offshoring his work: how it will work |
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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Utterly pathetic and I speak coming from a firm that has done exactly the same. Scum
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