Indian outsourcing leads to law firm layoffs

London-based law firm CMS Cameron McKenna is to make almost half of its IT staff redundant as part of plans to outsource more work to India.

After embarking on a review of its IT operations at the end of last year, the law firm has now signed a £10m deal with Indian outsourcing company HCL.

CMS Cameron McKenna's IT services will now be delivered by a combination of in-house IT workers and dedicated HCL staff in London and Chennai, India.

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Before the changes the size of CMS Cameron McKenna's IT department was 70 people, which included around 20 non-IT print room staff. Now that figure will be almost halved to 40 people as part of the outsourcing deal.

A spokesman for CMS Cameron McKenna said the consultation process is still ongoing but added that 20 IT staff will be made redundant and around 10 will transfer across to HCL. The moves are expected to be finalised over the next few weeks.

He told silicon.com: "The target was to get a more flexible and highly skilled workforce to assist us with future development. There are cost issues as well."

Philip Rooke, head of IT at CMS Cameron McKenna, said the decision to make staff redundant was "not taken lightly".

He said in a statement: "We have been at pains to keep staff informed and consulted both within the department and with the firm's Staff Council throughout this review."

While some dedicated on-site IT support will remain in-house, HCL will be responsible for CMS Cameron McKenna's data centre support, network, security and managed desktop services and application development, support and management.