10 ACC VALUE CHAMPIONS | A SPECIAL SUPPLEMEN T TO ACC DOCKET

The United Kingdom-based in-house legal team at British Telecom provides commercial legal support to BT’s Global Services (GS) line of business for transactions within the UK, and for major corporate and commercial transactions across the BT Group on a global basis.

Although GS brought in revenues of £ 8
billion in 2011-2012, “Like many compa-
nies our strategy is cost reduction. Legal
is not free from being evaluated. Our clients are demanding
more legal service for less money,” says David Eveleigh, GS
general counsel.

Eveleigh and Chris Fowler, UK chief counsel, began their value journey by asking themselves how they could free up and relocate some resources to key growth markets, such as the Asia-Pacific region. “We wanted our in-house lawyers focusing more on what they did rather than on who they did it for; we wanted a sharper operational focus,” Fowler says.

BT’s value initiative aimed to optimize legal value by
implementing “best-sourcing” initiatives to track what legal
services are requested and
deliver the right blend
(and cost) of offshore,
in-house, and external
resources appropriate
to the task. By “legal
value,” BT means that the
complexity and value of
the work should determine
the appropriate resource
to be used and cost to be
incurred.

Fowler wanted to find
out what tasks legal team
members were doing and
whether there were produc-
tivity opportunities. “We
undertook a detailed time
and motion study that revealed that a significant proportion of
the team’s work was low-level and repeatable,” he says.

BT took a captive organization in India and flipped it into
a legal process outsourcing partner, United Lex, to imple-
ment the value initiative, which hinges on best sourcing
and tracking processes. (BT has no ownership interest in
UnitedLex.) Now, all requests for legal work within GS
entered into a web-based portal go directly to UnitedLex,
which evaluates their complexity; more complex tasks are
passed to the in-house legal team in the UK while low-value,
Originally, those tasks included such things as addenda,
contract summaries, nondisclosure agreements, order forms and
RFPs. Since the inception of the project, the number of task
types handled by the LPO has expanded and includes procure-
ment review, contract generation, legal research and the like.
In 2012, approximately 30 percent of all work requests were
handled exclusively by the LPO.

“We invested time in documenting best practices and im-
plemented sophisticated triage rules,” says Eveleigh. “That was
valuable to our ability to monitor the work, manage to expecta-
tions and manage the performance of our own people.”
“We rethought our approaches and developed a playbook
that allowed faster time to market and service-level reporting,”
agrees Fowler.

Once valuable in-house resources were freed up, senior lawyers were relocated to Asia and the United States, putting them closer to BT’s growth markets and significantly reducing transactional expenses. The outsourcing arrangement allowed the team to manage a consistent workload with fewer people, resulting in a decrease in headcount from 78 to 40.

BT calculated average hourly costs for the in-house team, the LPO and external firms. It tracks the costs for each type of provider and produces a monthly aggregated Legal Value Index. Increased use of the LPO means that in-house resources are now devoted to higher-level work: Whereas 13 percent of work in 2010 was devoted to deals of more than £50 million, 21 percent of work was on those bigger deals by the end of 2012. BT Legal was also able to expand the range of specialized advice it provides, such as environmental, data protection and freedom of information issues.

“We wanted to get the lawyers in front of customers,” Fowler says. “We now can demonstrate to our internal customer that the value of their legal spend is being optimized and monitored.” vc

British Telecommunications plc

“Best Sourcing” Program Uses LPO Intake Portal and Optimizes Staffing

Chris Fowler

FROM THE JUDGES “Using this alternative methodology for intake was very interesting, and impressive that it assists in-house counsel to become more strategic without impacting the risk-based advice received by the company.”