Edward Hansen and Valerie A. Gross.

During the 1990s and early 2000s, outsourcing made a lot of waves as companies found ways to engage third parties to handle information technology work and farm many jobs out to less expensive labor markets. For many, that meant the elimination of a job and a negative association with the concept.

While outsourcing and business process change can still frequently translate into layoffs, the process has evolved, according to recent Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough hires Edward Hansen and Valerie Gross, and can also mean making existing workers more efficient—and, they say, happier.

"Cost savings and labor arbitrage are still involved," said Hansen, who recently joined the firm as partner and co-chair of the firm's outsourcing and digital transformation practice from Morgan, Lewis & Bockius. "But now companies are using outsourcing as a vehicle for transformation."

Hansen and Gross, based in New York, help companies negotiate complex contracts with outsourcing vendors, mostly involving technologies aimed at transforming an existing business process or driving efficiency.

Hansen said the outsourcing market is actually much larger than it was in the 1990s. But now, instead of simply contracting a third party to do work at a lower cost, businesses are using outsourcing and digital transformation to change the way employees work.

"One of the misconceptions with this is the loss of employees," Hansen said. "Companies find that their employees are being bogged down by tasks that they shouldn't need to do or they don't have the experience to handle. That doesn't mean the employee goes away, it just means they will work in a different manner."

Hansen and Gross practiced together at Morgan Lewis from 2016 until earlier this month, and prior to that worked together for two years at McCarter & English. They specialize in "information technology outsourcing, business process outsourcing, enterprise resource planning, digital transformation, re-platforming, and other complex system integrations," according to a firm release.

"As chair of the firm's legacy technology and procurement industry group, I'm excited to see our practice expand its capabilities in complex sourcing and digital transformation," said Jason Epstein, who co-chairs both the technology and outsourcing and digital transformation groups at Nelson Mullins, in a statement. "Ed and Val bring a unique whole-deal mindset that stresses relationship building, deal economics, hard-core collaboration, and human-based efficiencies. This thought leadership will be a tremendous benefit to our clients and the industry as a whole."

Hansen said his team is "vendor agnostic" when it comes to guiding clients in outsourcing deals, and they do not make recommendations on whether a particular provider should handle, say, a system migration or integration.

He said one of their main roles while working with clients is to help smooth the contracting process, to make sure agreements aren't too restrictive.

"Lawyers do what they find most comfortable, and the language in the contract ends up being too aggressive," Hansen said. "If people are going to suffer consequences because of one small misstep, they can't be creative."

Hansen said that while many firms have had outsourcing practices since the 1990s, he feels that there's little direct competition to the type of practice that he and Gross have developed.

"Our contracts are up there with anyone in the industry," he said. "But we take a look at the language, the psychology, the economics. If you create a place where people can come together, they can solve problems."

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