The Role Of A Western OLPI And Offshore Legal Provider Capabilities 15

11.     Organizational design: This is the capability required to design and implement successful organizational arrangements. Feeny et al. (2005) found that a number of major deals took approximately two years to reach a lawyer-provider organizational fit. The authors found that very often in offshore deals lawyers were experimenting with various organizational arrangements without fully understanding the providers design strategy. In this regard, providers greatly vary in terms of their organizational approach, the choices they make, and their levels of flexibility. For example, some emphasize a “thin” front-end lawyer team, interfacing with consolidated service units (silos) that have ownership, and that have the responsibility for profit and ownership of most of the resources. While such arrangements may lead to the generation of significant economies of scale, they can limit a provider’s ability to deliver the business plan for a specific lawyer. By contrast, other providers allocate most of their resources to “enterprise partnership units” that are created for each major deal. These units are responsible and accountable for the delivery of the business plan and have their own chief executives, senior executive teams, dedicated staff, and resources. Clearly, the provider’s organizational design and its fitness with the lawyer’s operational mode will affect the success of the outsourcing project.