Global reach winning efficiency gains for Herbert Smith Freehills

A low-cost offshore office is Herbert Smith Freehills’ edge.

Libby Jackson says clients want to retain the firm’s services but at the right price. Picture: James Croucher

HERBERT Smith Freehills is using its global reach to deliver efficiencies to clients not available to firms with an Australia-only presence.

Using its low-cost office in ­Belfast, the firm is increasingly ­offering legal services such as ­discovery, due diligence and ­contract management to local ­clients for a fraction of the price, without outsourcing any of the work.

A new innovation group has also been set up within the firm to gather novel ideas and work practices from its 24 offices, with a view to rolling them out worldwide.

Capitalising on a lower cost base and an investment grant, then Herbert Smith set up the Belfast office in 2011, billing clients about a third to a half of what they were charged for the same work undertaken in London.

Belfast director Libby Jackson, visiting Sydney, said clients had wanted to reap the savings offered by legal process outsourcing services but did not want their work split between two different organisations.

“Actually, what they wanted was for it to be done by us but at the right price,” she said.

In three years, the office has grown from 26 staff to about 150 — half of those lawyers and half paralegals.

Sydney-based global head of finance, real estate and projects, Patrick St John, said since the merger between Freehills and Herbert Smith, the firm’s Australian partners were increasingly embracing the Belfast office.

So far, they had sent a number of large matters there and the ­resource was gaining traction ­internally as more lawyers had positive experiences transferring work there.

Mr St John said previously, the firm may have completed a large M&A deal and then handed the “wash-up” — such as the novation of thousands of contracts — to someone else, but now it could offer to do that work out of Belfast.

Both Mr St John and Ms Jackson also lead a new high-level innovation group, set up in May by incoming chief executives Sonya Leydecker and Mark Rigotti.

Mr St John said the team was scouring the globe for innovative ways of solving legal problems and delivering services more ­efficiently.

“You can find a little idea that starts in the Madrid office and say, ‘well, if that works ... how can we use it in other places?’” he said.

For example, in Australia and Dubai, the firm had begun to use project managers to manage large legal projects and there was potential to roll this practice out more broadly.

In other offices, graduate lawyers were deployed in a pool rather than moving through rigid rotations — something the firm might look at bringing to Australia to drive efficiencies here.