Catherine Gannon trumpets the business benefits of outsourcing
Private practice lawyers should be comfortable with the concept of outsourcing. Whenever we receive an instruction it is because clients recognise they need a service that is outside their area of competence, or that their time is better spent on other matters.
This sounds self-evident, but for some reason we hesitate to outsource aspects of our own business. We often keep marketing and public relations in-house despite the fact that the skills and experience required to implement a successful marketing, or similar, are quite different to those needed in day-to-day legal practice.
Until seven months ago, my firm had kept its marketing function in-house. Since taking the plunge last summer, however, our experience of outsourcing it has been entirely positive—producing a significant cost saving, and driving an increase in instructions. Why was the decision not taken earlier to outsource? There are a number of reasons, none of which stands scrutiny.
The first can be traced back to the way that lawyers are hardwired to think in terms of chargeable hours. We cannot bill a client
