Global Sourcing
Industry Experience
Our outsourcing clients represent a broad spectrum of industries, including the following:
- Banking
- Energy and Power Generation
- Financial Services
- Healthcare
- Internet Service
- Insurance
- Life Sciences
- Manufacturing
- Payments Processing
- Pharmaceuticals
- Smart Grid
- Transportation and Logistics
- Travel and Reservations
We are fortunate to have particularly deep experience with clients in the insurance and financial services industries. Please click here to learn more about our insurance and financial services expertise.
Our Approach
One of the unique aspects of our outsourcing practice is that we represent both customers and suppliers. Our customer-side clients are some of the largest companies in the world, with operations frequently covering more than 40 countries. Our supplier-side clients provide some of the most cutting-edge sourcing services to some of the largest companies around the globe. Our ability to represent both customers and suppliers is enhanced by the fact that we benefit from the perspective of the “other side of the table” in transactions. This increased understanding of the mutuality of interests with respect to any given issue on a complex outsourcing transaction allows us to more quickly close the gap and arrive at more precisely tailored solutions for any given issue.
Clients also benefit from our experience with every top-tier outsourcing supplier and most of the second-tier outsourcing service providers. Knowing the particular sensitivities of these suppliers means we can counsel clients proactively to help set client expectations in a manner consistent with a particular supplier’s strengths, weaknesses and sensitivities. Also, we maintain high-level (but appropriate) contacts within many of these supplier organizations to keep deals moving during the negotiation process, even when the parties seem to be at an impasse.
We have also developed an extensive roster of outsourcing specialists, with whom we work around the globe on multinational transactions when the services of local counsel are required. Given the extensive legal overlap between the acquisition of global services and the management and use of personal information, each of our outsourcing lawyers is conversant in the major privacy issues of the day, particularly as those issues impact outsourcing transactions. We often work with even deeper privacy experts within our firm and with members of the Alston & Bird Global Privacy and Security Network for specific privacy advice as it relates to outsourcing transactions.
We have well-established and valuable relationships with the leading outsourcing advisory firms, including Alsbridge, TPI, Everest Group, the W Group and others. As clients have increasingly turned to in-house advisors with respect to sourcing transactions, our practice has increasingly involved in-house advisory solutions. We are flexible in the structure of our documents and have standing templates for each of the advisory firms.
Finally, as the sourcing process has been streamlined and consolidated over the years, our services have also evolved. In particular, we aggressively deploy the use of technology and paraprofessionals to reduce overall transaction costs. Given our extensive experience and knowledge of sourcing transactions, we are also able to structure and execute innovative alternative fee structures that allow us to deliver more price predictability and reduced costs for clients.
We have handled some of the largest and most complex global sourcing and procurement arrangements undertaken to date. Examples include:
- Acting for a global bottling company on a Pan-Atlantic F&A BPO.
- Advising a global financial institution on a sourcing strategy assessment and a series of sourcing initiatives to reposition it to grow and compete in emerging Asian economies.
- Representing a major European corporation in an integrated set of “third generation” global IT transactions (reportedly the largest “new money” sourcing of the year).
- Acting for the largest global beverage company on global networking and IT sourcing projects.
- Advising a major governmental entity in the Southern Hemisphere on a procurement improvement project for the department of defense in advance of $80 billion in spending over the next 10 years.