globe in hand

DXC Technology, a technology conglomerate of Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC) and Hewlett Packard Enterprise's Enterprise Services business (HPES), on Tuesday announced that it would adopt technology-enabled legal outsourcing provider UnitedLex to restructure its in-house department. The two companies are calling the deal the largest-ever managed services transaction in the legal industry.

The five-year agreement calls for UnitedLex to provide a team of more than 250 senior-level professionals to support DXC's global legal operations across all client transactions. These professionals, mostly attorneys, engineers and contracts professionals, will work both remotely and on-site and are drawn from nearly 26 geographic locations.

DXC general counsel Bill Deckelman explained that a shift in the industry to high volumes of smaller contracts, paired with the company's April merger, prompted the deal with UnitedLex. He said he felt the legal outsourcing provider could offer the kind of contract management technology that DXC's in-house team needed to keep up with the increasing need for speed around contracting, but for a much-reduced cost overall.

“As part of the merger, we needed to take out cost as a result of putting the two organizations together,” Deckelman noted. “We looked at the traditional ways of reducing staff and offshoring and all the things [organizations] traditionally do and figured out that we couldn't do that, and, at the same time, make the necessary investments in a contracting platform.”

UnitedLex CEO Daniel Reed said the deal differs from similar legal outsourcing transactions in its scale and complexity. “It wasn't just some kind of small reshuffling of the chairs,” he said. “We're actually arranging billion-dollar agreements.”

As part of the deal, Reed said a “substantial” group of DXC professionals will be “rebadged” or transferred from positions at HPES and CSC to UnitedLex but continue to work with DXC's in-house team. UnitedLex professionals will operate as DXC operatives with DXC email addresses and business cards on matters for the technology company.

“We've retained lawyers who cover the waterfront of all the things normally required, such as litigation, regulatory and employment law matters. We still have our staff with DXC. But the transactional, legal operations, immigration and other legal service areas have transferred to UnitedLex,” Deckelman said.

“There's a lot of innovation and transformation happening; the idea is that it's not disruptive,” Reed added of the in-house department's shift.

DXC's in-house department is slated to use UnitedLex's platforms, including its contract management system, for transactions work. Deckelman noted that the platform makes use of Salesforce to manage contract handling and has data analytics capabilities that help provide oversight and reduce risk.

Reed shared his high hopes for the deal's potential to transform legal services delivery. “It is the largest deal in legal to ever occur over a five-year period. There's nothing in the same ZIP code or even country code, quite frankly, of what this effort involved.”

Deckelman said the budgetary and financial realities of both technology servicing companies like DXC and other industries may indeed prompt more companies to take a similar approach to their in-house work.

“I really do think it's going to become more and more of a model. We're moving into this era where digital is starting to deliver on the promise of technology. I know this because this is what we do for our clients,” Deckelman said. He added that demand for technology-enabled efficiency is quickly moving into the legal sector as well.

UnitedLex is certainly not alone in attempting to bring business and technology sector innovations to bear in the legal industry. Alternative legal services provider Axiom has billed itself as “technology-enabled legal services,” and more recently, Atrium launched as parallel law firm-legal tech startup ventures.