According to Altman Weil’s 2016 Law Firm in Transition Survey, 21.2% of large law firms (250 lawyers or more) and 5.8% of small law firms less than 250 are creating low-cost service centers for back office support.
Just last month, global giant DLA Piper made headlines by announcing its plans to cut up to 200 supports jobs in finance, human resources, information technology, marketing and secretarial teams from its UK offices, with the bulk of these roles being moved to a new back-office operations center in Warsaw.
The reasons given by COO Andrew Darwin were not just cost savings of a lower cost talent pool, but an overall strategy to modernize business service functions and improve quality, consistency and efficiency in the way the firm delivers services to its clients.
These moves were in light of a year of flat revenue per lawyer for the firm, and a net income drop of 9.2%–and an increase in profits per partner of 5.4 percent.
- Is this a success story of streamlining operations?
- Is it a story of a firm cutting overhead to improve profits per partner?
- Does this strategy, if successful, work only for large firms?
- Is this the only path to lower costs and improve efficiencies?
Please join Mattern & Associates for our upcoming webinar on Wednesday, June 15th at noon: “Middle Office Outsourcing: Is it Right for Your Firm?”
In this webinar, President of Mattern & Associates, Rob Mattern, and Director of Client Technology and Strategy, Stephen Cole, will review the most recent trends in middle office outsourcing, successes and failures, how firms can define achievable goals from the onset and what questions to ask now to help assess and define those goals.
We hope you join us for this vital, live webinar discussion on Wednesday, June 15th; please email Lisa Schneider at lschneider@matternassoc.com, and she will send you the registration link.
