The State of Sourcing

Some recent news on the Indian publishing scene inspired me to explore how the market is emerging in the trade category, especially in the English language.

• The Tata Group is aggressively focusing on their book publishing business. The company aims to be amongst the top five in India within the next three years.
• Penguin India has chosen one of the most popular Indian writers, Shobhaa Dé, to acquire a new line of books for the publishing house. The imprint – Shobhaa Dé Books – to be released in 2011 will cater to an urban English speaking audience.
• Penguin-India has been recording approx. 25% growth in sales. Random House, Harper Collins, Rupa and some others have been increasing their titles each year.

Outsourcing destination! That’s the foremost identity while referring to ‘India’ and ‘publishing’ together. India has emerged as a key destination for sourcing publishing services for US and UK based publishers for over two decades. But publishers viewing India as a potential market ? – It’s a different ballgame!

Continue reading ‘India: From a service hub to a potential market?’ »

- Osborne Clarke outsources technology, business intelligence, knowledge management, transcription, word processing and secretarial services.
- Clifford Chance outsources legal services like document review along with support services such as IT and document production.
- Pinsent Masons outsources document review services along with secretarial work.
- Law firms like Eversheds, Lovells and Linklaters that currently outsource support functions and are considering outsourcing legal services.

Interestingly, law firms are looking at offloading both legal and support services!

Continue reading ‘Bundled offerings in LPO’ »

British Telecom (BT) recently announced its decision to shift work from its captive legal services center (located in India) to UnitedLex, a leading LPO. Another gain for the LPO industry! According to a press release issued by UnitedLex, a team of 15 professionals from UnitedLex will provide commercial contracting and antitrust regulation services to BT legal teams in UK, US, India, Singapore and Hong Kong. Founded four years ago, UnitedLex employs 550 lawyers globally, with a majority located in India and the some based out of the US and Israel.

Five years back, BT decided to withdraw their legal services work from outside counsel and start an in-house unit. Currently, they have about 500 people spread across the globe offering legal support services to the BT operations along with a 15-20 man team operating from Gurgaon, India.

Continue reading ‘Captive no more…’ »

Red Bridge Strategy, Inc. is organizing a Global Legal Process Management Boot Camp during the week of May 17th in Mumbai and Delhi. Attendees will broadly learn about global legal process management and specifically about Legal Process Outsourcing (LPO). Presentations, facilities tours, and personalized discussions are expected to educate and inform general counsels, law firm partners and senior attorneys seeking to understand the industry, its benefits, and its challenges.

The Boot Camp will provide attendees with firsthand exposure to the operating environment in India including local talent, business practices, culture, and infrastructure while simultaneously explaining local measures that address security, ethics, confidentiality, and other topics. Industry authorities from Integreon, Pangea3, UnitedLex, Red Bridge Strategy, Inc., ValueNotes, and others will educate attendees.

Continue reading ‘Global Legal Process Management Boot Camp’ »

India Chapter of New York State Bar Association (NYSBA) is organizing a conference on “Building Bridges between the United States and India” from 25-27 Mar 2010 at Mumbai.

The conference will focus on contemporary corporate and legal themes. Speakers include Stephen P. Younger (Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler LLP, NYC), James P Duffy III (Past Chair, NYSBA, NYC), Michael W. Galligan (Immediate Past Chair, NYSBA, NYC), Steven C. Krane (Chair, NYSBA, NYC), Som Mandal (FoxMandal Little, New Delhi), Cyril Shroff (Amarchand Mangaldas Suresh A. Shroff & Co, Mumbai), Nishith Desai (Nishith Desai Associates, Mumbai) and Arun Jethmalani (CEO, ValueNotes) among others.

For more details about the event, please click here.

Hiring contract review attorneys, temp staffing companies, litigation support companies – these are the various options available for procuring LPO services within US.

Over the last one year, the legal market in the US witnessed dramatic changes. A large number of attorneys, associates and support staff from the law firms and corporations lost their jobs. While this has impacted the legal market, it has also increased competition for the offshore LPO industry. Some of the lawyers, associates and paralegals (who lost their jobs) are seeking work as contract attorneys (with reduced billing rates!). A contract review attorney is billed at a much lower rate as compared to a law associate. The average billing rates for contract attorneys range from $35 to $80 per hour and onshore service providers rates range from $50 to $180 per hour.

While billing rates vary depending on the services offered, volume and their complexity level, marginal pressure on billing rates (for certain services) in the offshore industry was visible. Of course, the billing rates of onshore lawyers will not be comparable to rates of the offshore service providers; however the increasing competition for offshore LPO service providers cannot be dismissed.

Continue reading ‘Competition from onshore?’ »

Finance Minister, Pranab Mukherjee emphasized on ‘inclusive growth’ in this year’s budget. The focus was more on the education, infrastructure and social sector development.

From the IT-BPO industry’s perspective, the budget did not provide a reason to celebrate. There were no long term benefits announced for the IT and BPO industry. While there were no major positives for the industry, these are some of the recommendations by the Finance Minister of relevance to the BPO/IT sectors.

Increased outlay for education and infrastructure: The Finance Minister has given special attention to the education and infrastructure sectors. This will benefit the IT-BPO industry in the long term (provided it is implemented properly) by way of availability of a larger and employable talent pool and better infrastructure.

Continue reading ‘Budget 2010-2011: No reason to celebrate?’ »

For paper manufactures like Norske Skog, AbitibiBowater and Stora Enso the past few months have been critical. The newspaper industry, one of their largest market, has been witnessing significant upheavals in operations. Newspaper publishers are in the midst of many challenges, and the rise in cost of print is just going to trouble them more. According to RISI (a consultancy firm for paper and pulp products), global rates has increased by 25%.  This has led to many publishers in growing markets shelving launch/expansions and those in developed markets feeling an additional pinch.

While cost pressures have always existed, revenue pressures hit newspaper publishers hard – an aftermath of the economic collapse.  Publishers lost advertisers, consumers were cutting back on expenses and moving online to gain access to news – prompting many to migrate to and address the digital market. As the prices of raw materials increase at the paper manufacturer’s end and consequently at the publisher’s, the ability to align rising costs with prices of newspapers will get tougher. Affording news in print will be a luxury, and this in turn will prompt a significant portion of newspaper readers to move online.

Continue reading ‘How will paper manufacturers cope?’ »

The e-book market is still hazy at best, and the influx of e-book readers is not helping publishers and readers.  To get a better sense of how many e-book readers are out there, I did a Google News search. There are close to 1500 articles from the start of this year – an indicator of the flurry of activity that the device space has seen. (In all fairness, a significant proportion of them might be from Apple and the iPad). I am  amazed at how many e-book readers are already out there or are due for launch. Many gadget companies have already started looking at this space and are accordingly launching their products. I have listed a few of the e-book readers that I have come across. (Do let me know if I missed any)

Amazon Kindle, Sony Reader, Barnes and N0ble Nook, Apple iPad, Plastic Logic, InfiMedia Pi, Asus, Lenovo, Acer, Samsung, Neonode, BeBook, Spring Design Alex, Aluratek Libre, Yinlips, Teclast K3, Oppo Enjoy, Hanlin, Cube, iRiver, Interead Cool-er, Elonex, Bookeen Cybook Opus, Onyx BOOX, QuokkaPad, Hanvon, IREX, Copia

Continue reading ‘Reading into the device market…’ »

US President Barack Obama announced his decision to end tax breaks to American firms that ship out jobs abroad. In his first State of Union address, he said “To encourage… businesses to stay within our borders, it is time to finally slash the tax breaks for companies that ship our jobs overseas, and give those tax breaks to companies that create jobs right here in the United States of America.”

Since this announcement, there have been speculations about the impact of this move on the offshore service providers (especially the Indian IT and ITES industry) and the future of the outsourcing industry.

Continue reading ‘End of tax breaks! – Can outsourcing be wished away in this era?’ »