Press Release
Eversheds announces joint venture to outsource legal services from UK to South Africa
22 January 2010
Eversheds South Africa has announced that it is to pilot an innovative joint venture with Eversheds UK to provide outsourced legal services to the firm's major UK clients more cost-effectively. Starting in February 2010, the South African office will provide a range of legal services for Eversheds’ international clients.
Says Sven Laurencik, a partner at the Johannesburg office who is project managing the joint venture in South Africa: “Discussions with our UK office started in December 2009 about the drafting of leases for a major UK based client, who had requested that this service be outsourced in order to cut costs. This initial project acted as a catalyst in developing discussions to provide services for other clients in a joint venture between the firm's UK and Johannesburg offices, including high volume work on a case ownership basis such as mortgage repossessions and insurance recoveries, with potentially personal injury claims and employment tribunal work at a later stage.
“This is different to the outsourcing concept followed by many organisations where work is mainly outsourced because it only requires low-level skills. We provide high quality professionals and the same quality of legal expertise as our UK office with good turnaround times at lower rates than the UK, simply because overheads for legal services are lower in SA and the exchange rate is in our favour. In addition, the firm has an excellent infrastructure that allows us to take on high volumes of additional work at a higher level of complexity than the type of work that may be outsourced to other ‘low cost centres’.
“The key is to build trusted relationships with clients and, once these are established, we will review the success of the pilot.”
During the pilot, two associates from Eversheds’ Johannesburg office will be sent to Eversheds’ Cardiff office with the aim to acquire an understanding of their clients’ requirements. Once they move back to SA after approximately six months, they will continue to liaise directly with the UK clients, while still reporting to their team leader, based in Cardiff, UK.
Eversheds UK has a full-time innovation group, led by Graham Richardson, that is responsible for driving innovation across the firm’s practice areas and finding new ways of delivering legal services to provide clients with increased value.
Says Graham Richardson, who is leading the South African joint venture project: "Our client base is increasingly global and our clients are unconcerned as to whether the work is done in South Africa, Birmingham or India, as long as it's done cost-effectively and efficiently, and the quality is guaranteed by the Eversheds brand. If your strategy to deal with market forces is simply to reduce prices, that strategy is unsustainable; pressure on the margins will inevitably lead to a decline in quality. That's not what we're about as a firm.”
Terry Mahon, chairman of Eversheds South Africa, comments: “The manner in which legal services are delivered is in the process of undergoing enormous transformation worldwide and we are excited to be trendsetters for this new outsourcing concept. Eversheds operates internationally as one and it makes sense for us to use our network of offices to move work from higher cost centres to lower cost centres, giving clients the benefit of a high quality service but delivered cost effectively.”