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Lawyer visits Bangalore to outsource jobs to Scotland

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A Scottish lawyer has taken his government to Bangalore to convince Indian outsourcing companies to set up call centres in Scotland.

He hopes that a large draw will be the avoidance of protectionist measures such as those recently proposed by US President Barrack Obama.

Since yesterday (9 June), head of outsourcing Andrew Rigby of Scottish law firm Brodies is attending the Nasscom business process outsourcing (BPO) summit in India with a delegation from Scottish government and industry.

In particular, he hopes to propose to Indian outsourcers that opening hubs in places such as Scotland could save them money, create new business opportunities and avoid the increase of Western protectionism.

Rigby told Legally India from Bangalore: "From talking to a large number of BPO suppliers it is clear that in the face of a changing market, the Indian BPO sector is adapting its business model.

"There is a great desire to be global but act locally - in other words, creating a global presence in the West through opening service centres or acquiring local businesses."

He is the chief architect behind the so-called "outsourcing hub initiative", which aims to develop Scotland as a serious outsourcing centre.

His audience of Indian outsourcing companies may be particularly receptive after Obama's remarks in May that US companies were being taxed less for creating a job in Bangalore than creating one in Buffalo, New York.

Obama's comments made him into a temporary hate figure in the popular media and caused concern in the IT and outsourcing community.

Rigby said: "We want to encourage some Indian vendors, who will be faced with this Obama problem that could also happen in the UK, to set up small operations in some of the larger geographic areas."

He explained that such outsourcing companies would be able to provide part of their service offering on-shore, as opposed to off-shore, and therefore avoid protectionist legislation and taxes.

Rigby was selected as one of The Lawyer magazine's Hot 100 lawyers in 2008 for his Scottish outsourcing hub initiative, which he believes could add billions of pounds to Scotland's economic output.

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