Top 20 firm Ashurst has made 15 redundancies to its overnight production staff in London nearly halving the City firm’s 34-person team following a consultation process last month.
The past year has seen a number of UK firms scale back their back-office support teams to become more efficient and save costs. While the remaining half of the team will continue to work in London, the firm plans to outsource a greater portion of late-night document production work to an offshore provider.
A spokesperson for Ashurst said: ‘It is to improve efficiency. You can’t always predict capacity levels, whereas if you’re outsourcing it then whether or not there’s a phenomenal amount of jobs or the jobs are all completed in normal working hours it doesn’t make much of a difference.’
The firm’s Australian offices have operated a hub model, whereby a streamlined document production team receive work and post it onto outsourcers, for at least 18 months.
The move to downsize this part of the team comes after 350 staff roles were initially earmarked for redundancy after the firm created a 150-strong unit in Glasgow last year to cover back office support and volume legal work, including document review in litigation and corporate work.
Some 120 employees were later given the option to transfer to the firm’s new lower cost Glasgow site or take redundancy.
tom.moore@legalease.co.uk
