Jobling steps aside as head of volume business BT Law
An innovator long at the vanguard of transforming the traditional in-house legal function, BT in February entered into a three-year contract with Axiom to provide the telecoms giant with legal outsourcing and analytics services across the UK, US, Africa, Middle East and Asia, replacing and extending a contract formerly held by legal process outsourcing (LPO) provider UnitedLex.
All work previously undertaken by UnitedLex, which includes 30% of BT’s global services division’s legal work in the UK, transferred to Axiom on 1 February after a successful tender process that concluded towards the end of 2013.
However, this service will also be extended in volume and type, with Axiom contracted to undertake 30-50 instructions per day across Europe, US/Canada and APAC, from simple work such as non-disclosure agreements and first mark-ups of contracts during requests for proposals, to more sophisticated work like end-to-end negotiations of master service agreements and product and service agreements.
Axiom will support BT from its European headquarters in London and international centres in Belfast, Gurgaon and Houston, giving the telecoms giant commercial and administrative support for 20 hours a day.
Its LPO arm will also act as triage for work coming into the legal department under what BT refers to as its ‘front door policy’ – applying a detailed criteria to decide whether work should be handled by Axiom, sent on to BT’s legal department or reserved for a dialogue over the appropriate response.
This unique set-up was successfully trialled by UnitedLex, which undertook commoditised contract work for BT in the US and India between 2010 and the end of last year.
However, Axiom will be providing sophisticated data analytics with a view to reducing needlessly repetitive processes and negotiation of documents that could as easily and more cheaply be absorbed into the outsourcing agreement.
The move is part of BT’s efforts to streamline the ‘who’ and ‘how’ of its legal function by systematically delegating tasks to the most appropriate team member and accelerating response times.
BT’s director of compliance and chief operations officer, Gareth Tipton, who has been overseeing the process, said: ‘This is the next stage of our LPO story and an important part of BT’s legal transformation programme. This relationship will not only enable BT to support its contracting function more efficiently, but it will also allow the in-house legal team to delegate work that does not require their specific expertise in order to focus on the more complex legal and commercial challenges that impact corporate objectives and add bottom-line value to the business.’
The move comes as last month also saw BT head of litigation Miles Jobling step aside as head of its volume business, BT Law. Sheffield-based BT Law co-founder Archana Makol has taken over as compliance officer for legal practice (COLP).
Jobling, who last year secured a licence from the Solicitors Regulation Authority to hive off BT’s successful motor claims business into an alternative business structure, will now refocus his efforts on his role as head of the 155-strong global litigation, employment and corporate investigations team.
The move comes as last month also saw BT hire the former principal legal adviser at Sky, Bruce Breckenridge, as its new GC for competition and regulatory. The position was created in a bid to centralise responsibility with a specialist competition lawyer leading BT’s team of 16 competition lawyers and acting as the principal point of contact for BT’s senior executives.