BT has sealed a deal to send basic legal tasks to outsourcing provider UnitedLex, spelling the end of its in-house legal support services team in India.

From 1 April, a 15-strong UnitedLex team (including lawyers, project managers and online support and administrative staff) will handle commercial contracting and antitrust regulation work for BT's offices in the UK, the US, India, Singapore and Hong Kong. The team will be based in Gurgaon, India.

BT's existing legal support services team, which was set up five years ago and is also based in Gurgaon, will cease to exist. However, the telecoms giant insists there will be no job losses, with its employees offered roles within the new UnitedLex team.

BT Global Services general counsel David Eveleigh said: "Our existing Gurgaon-based in-house team delivering legal support services has performed extremely well, but the time is right for us to transition the work and our people to an established legal process outsourcer, which can offer industry best practices and provide global scalability."

UnitedLex chief executive officer Dan Reed commented: "Delivering measurable quality and strategic legal technology are the two critical objectives and form our key business mandates. Accordingly, we have designed a robust quality control and quality assurance process to ensure consistently high, measurable quality for our work product."

The move follows the news earlier this week that former Cable & Wireless legal chief Daniel Fitz is replacing Anne Fletcher as BT's new group general counsel.