Many of you who keep yourselves abreast of the developments in the LPO scenario around the globe must have heard about the “largest deal in the legal market”. But the much spoken about LPO deal between CMS Cameron McKenna and Integreon for a 10-year, period and valued at £583 million seems to be not exclusively for pure legal services. It seems to be for a well coined level of “middle-office services”
As reported by “legal futures” (see http://www.legalfutures.co.uk/latest-news/susskind-backs-camerons-600m-outsourcing-deal), Cameron has agreed to outsource “substantial portions of accounting and finance, human resources and training, marketing and communications, learning and development, library and information services, research, information technology, facilities and other services”.
I believe that LPO services per se should have something to do with law and legal work. If “legal futures” has reported it right, I wonder why the deal is being termed as a LPO deal when a good part of the work off-shored is of the nature of human resource and training; marketing and communications; accounting and finance etc.
So can a deal be called a LPO deal just because some work from a law firm is being off-shored to India, irrespective of the nature of the off-shored work? I mean, isn’t it weird to get the accounting work of a law firm off-shored to India and call it a LPO deal? While counting the inflow of foreign exchange to India on a national basis, can you count the revenues from it as being earned from LPO activities? I would really like to stand educated if any one from E Value Serve or the like, step in and explain the calculation methodology. More often than not, we get statistics from such companies talking about the foreign income inflow into India from LPO activities in India; so what do you take into account for arriving at such figures?
Perhaps it is time that we actually differentiated pure LPO activities from that of a “mixed-play”.
Is Integreon calling it a LPO deal or is it just another off-shoring deal incidentally with a law firm?
Well here is my view on this deal.
ReplyDeleteIntegreon apart from being a prominent player in the LPO field is also quite active in other KPO areas like finance among others.
The deal with the law firm is for legal and other services.
To make the deal more attractive Integreon might have offered other services by leveraging on its existing capabilities in other Knowledge Management Area.
But, the deal happened ( I guess)primarily because of Inegreon's role as an lpo with other services thrown in to make the deal more lucrative and attractive to Client and the Vendor.
Therefore it is only correct if the deal is being projected as the lpo deal.