Clifford Chance has taken the unprecedented step of hiring two lawyers from its Gurgaon-based legal support centre as associates in the main law firm, reported The Lawyer magazine today.
One will join the Abu Dhabi capital markets team, while another will join the London banking team. Both of them come on board at the equivalent level to newly qualified lawyers.
The duo was previously employed in the firm's Gurgaon-based knowledge centre, which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Clifford Chance that carries out quasi-paralegal work including document review, contract drafting, research and due diligence.
Clifford Chance knowledge centre director Mark Ford told The Lawyer: "They're very capable lawyers, they've impressed us with their work and we wanted to offer them a career development step. They were keen to take on a practising role, it was either that or in all likelihood they would have gone somewhere else."
However, Ford emphasised to The Lawyer that despite their individual success the Indian offshore centre is totally separate from the firm and should not be seen as "a conveyor belt into Clifford Chance - it's a separate function".
That said, he added: "If we have someone in the knowledge centre who's really talented then we wouldn't rule it out."
Starting salaries for a newly qualified lawyer at Clifford Chance in London are currently £59,000 (Rs 45 lakhs) per year.
The starting salary at Clifford Chance's offshoring centre is understood to be around Rs 5.5 lakhs (£7,700) per annum.
Clifford Chance's annual report of September stated that staff in its Indian knowledge centre had billed 12,000 hours of work in the last financial year, which is rougly the equivalent of the hours billed by seven London associates.
This is an edited version of an article that first appeared in The Lawyer magazine's print edition today.
Clifford Chance promotes two lawyers from LPO into firm
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Who has been promoted from LPO to the Firm,can you give a name..Fox Mandal LPOt is a white elephant which is burning holes in pocket of the firm and that why the corporate department of the firm saw departures of [...] lawyers in past two months.
How can somebody from Fox mandal LPo can be promoted to law firm, when LPO has no lawyers but enginners.
and WTF, 120 lawyers, has FML delhi office any time had 120 lawyers..
Kian,send this joker out of this site.... [...]
The story reported at
www.legallyindia.com/20090925213/Law-firms/Clifford-Chance-offshore-Indian-lawyers-work-on-300-deals
cites a CC report as "Knowledge Centre lawyers worked with 15 offices last year, putting in over 12,000 hours of work on over 300 client projects". This is probably the case, that the offshore guys billed 12000 in total. If so, what is the link with 7 London associate hours?
@ Kian - could you please clarify Kian? I know the story is old, but you guys do such a good job. It would be great if you can throw some light.
On that basis, the work done by the LPO was similar to what 7 associates working at 100% utilisation would be doing.
In practice it probably doesn't work out as neatly, as the time spent or billed by London/LPO associates could be not directly tranposable, and some of the work is bound to be paralegal work.
But thought it was a good way of putting the figure into context.
Hope that answers your query.
Best regards,
Kian
best,
fan :-)
I agree, it is not a major breaking news story but more of a little insight into what the CC captive LPO was up to, which I thought was interesting.
It is quite a unique model and approach that CC has taken and many people are interested in how it will progress - particularly UK/US lawyers who feel that outsourcing is a major threat to their careers and livelihoods.
Best regards and glad you are enjoying the site,
Kian
I hope that things remain this way despite the spectacular way Legallyindia is growing in content.
Fan.
Apologies, however, if I have been slow in replying to anyone's emails - we do read everything you send us but sometimes there just don't seem to be enough hours in the day. We hope to revert on all queries in any case.
Best regards,
Kian
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