Integreon Receives Top Marks in Bloomberg Article on Legal Outsourcing

Comment from Liam Brown, Integreon President & CEO

This article (click on the link to go to article) provides an opportunity to communicate to our customer community a couple of distinctions about Integreon’s business strategy:

The first is that we support lawyers in law firms rather than compete with them. We provide a growing number of law firm operations with E-Discovery, litigation document review, document production (word processing and trial graphics), business development research, finance and accounting services (to name a few), on an enterprise basis from one of our delivery centers in US, India or Philippines.

Our corporate general counsel customers tell us that they rely on and will continue to rely on their outside counsel for a law firm’s core competency of providing advice and high value legal services. They rely on Integreon as a high quality, easy to work with, cost-effective provider of legal support services, such as E-Discovery, litigation document review and contract management, which are not core to a law firm. Typically we work in support of their in-house lawyers or hand in hand with their outside counsel, as a team.

A good example is that we have contracts with many of our corporate customers for litigation services so that when they engage their outside counsel for a litigation matter, they engage Integreon for the E-Discovery and Document Review, and we work with their outside counsel, often with the oversight of their outside counsel. This allows the outside counsel to focus on managing the litigation legal strategy, while allowing the company to control expenses and follow a standard, repeatable, efficient process for the litigation support.

The second is that we successfully apply the lessons we have learned about managing highly educated professionals as part of our industrial scale Research and Analytics business to our Legal Services business. Our business runs a 20% annual employee attrition rate in India (much less in Philippines, US and Europe), which is half the attrition rate of most of our peers. This is an important business indicator for us since we invest so much time and money in training and developing professional and domain experience in our associates, which leads to improved quality of service to customers and to productivity and efficiency gains (simply, our people are better every year they stay with us). We do that a number of ways, but one way we do that is to carefully match the education and experience of our associates to the work they will actually perform.

Our Research and Analytics business for investment banking has been very stable because we didn’t hire top tier business school graduates for every position (of course we do for some). The graduates from the next tier of school that we recruited from were given a great career opportunity for long term growth, performing very interesting work – so they have stayed with us and our cost base is being managed sensibly. We believed that the graduates from the top tier schools would be recruited by the investment banks, hedge funds, etc. to enter their traditional US and European banking programs and that if we hired them we would be unlikely to retain them as a provider of professional knowledge support services. And that is exactly what happened. We believe the same thing will happen with legal. As US and European law firms look to recruit from Indian law schools, we will avoid competing with them. The legal support services work that we provide corporations and law firms provides an interesting and demanding mix of work from the graduates we recruit from the next tier of law schools, which we believe will lead to lower employee attrition – and better quality and efficiency of work for our customers.

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