New Zealand becomes outsourcing hub for virtual legal services

By Darise Ogden

FORMER LAWYERS with extensive UK experience are now providing legal services to support UK lawyers through outsourcing company Latitude South Pte Ltd – and they’re doing it from their homes in New Zealand.

Launched this week by Andrew Hamilton and Larissa Glubb, Latitude South has been designed to help UK in-house legal teams and law firms reduce the costs of substantive legal work by outsourcing the work to a team of New Zealand-based former lawyers with UK and international experience. Latitude South, which is not a law firm and does not provide legal advice, will assist UK lawyers with professional support and know-how services, the design of standard form agreements, the drafting of bespoke documents, and peer review. The company will also provide project management and legal process engineering services to help unbundle the substantive work appropriate for outsourcing.

Glubb and Hamilton, who both studied law in New Zealand and worked here in the early parts of their careers, are based in Asia. “Given that New Zealand is 12 to 13 hours ahead of the UK, we needed to ensure that there was a time zone overlap for the business model to work from both a UK client perspective and that of our team members,” said Glubb. “Asia was the logical choice to provide the bridge between the UK and New Zealand, and allows us to operate from a lower-cost location.”

As a provider of legal services to a variety of legal organisations, Latitude South is dedicated to providing its clients with a secure network. As such, no information will be stored on hardware housed in the company’s satellite offices, instead, everything will be stored on the company’s secure data centres in Singapore. “Team members will access a secure private network and work only in that environment at all times,” said Glubb. “The access to that environment is heavily defended with one of the best systems available.” In addition, all of the satellite offices must conform to high standards of physical security.

Latitude South’s dedication to security also extends to keeping confidential the identity of their New Zealand-based team members. However, each of the members must have solid, top-tier, UK experience, with Glubb advising that members of the Latitude South team have previously worked at Allen & Overy, Herbert Smith, Barlow, Lyde & Gilbert, Goldman Sachs, Mobil Oil, and PricewaterhouseCoopers. “They are all senior level professionals – each current team member has nine-plus years PQE,” she said. “Many are dual qualified in New Zealand and the UK and some are former partners.”

At this stage, Latitude South will be focusing solely on providing legal services in support of UK lawyers. However, phase two will focus on the US market, where there are more virtual law firms and a more accepting market in respect of legal outsourcing generally. It’s also a market in which many New Zealand lawyers have strong legal experience.

Latitude South is actively seeking senior lawyers with substantial, top-tier, UK legal experience, and can provide an avenue for them to continue to leverage recently gained UK experience on the global stage, said Glubb. For more information on Latitude South, go to http://www.latitude-south.com/.

NZLawyer, issue 125, 13 November 2009