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Unleashing the Potential of Outsourcing

By Richard Culberson |
October 24, 2024

Unleashing the Potential of Outsourcing

The following article was contributed by Richard Culberson, CEO of Moneypenny & VoiceNation, North America.

Every leader knows the importance of maximizing the potential of their people, clients, and business. It’s about recognizing the value of your resources and optimizing their efficiency. This can be achieved by streamlining, leveraging technology, and investing in people, however, one solution that is gaining momentum in the legal world is outsourcing.  

Traditionally, businesses used outsourcing to save money by obtaining help with non-essential administrative tasks, thereby avoiding the costs of hiring and training employees and purchasing equipment and it’s been proven to be an effective way to control expenses. 

However, today, Outsourcing 2.0 is more than just a cost-saving measure. It is about collaborating to grow, thrive and maximize value.  

Take the humble phone call as an example. Whether it is a new inquiry or an existing client, every call is important and ensuring that they are answered, and opportunities are never missed is particularly crucial for law firms, whatever their size. On average one in 10 calls to a law firm is from someone making a new inquiry. If they go unanswered that is business lost, or worse, it is business that goes to the competition.  

Outsourcing your calls could help you never miss a call, avoid interruptions, and support business continuity. For example, it can allow your firm to operate seamlessly, whether it is a busy day in court, meetings, an office move, or a holiday. Furthermore, it should be able to work as a faultless extension of your business, so that no one knows you have a partner to answer your calls, for example.  

The same goes for other functions. Marketing and IT tasks can take away time that attorneys could be spending on billable hours. Just like you would hire an expert in a field that is out of your legal realm, outsourcing can support law firms to save valuable time, manage overflow, reduce costs, improve the litigation process, and allow employees to focus on key tasks. 

As a business leader, you understand your business’s strengths and areas where it needs support better than anyone else, so it is logical to look at ways you can focus on these strengths and seek assistance for other aspects.  Especially when you consider the tangible benefits that outsourcing can deliver to businesses, all while making financial sense. The key is finding the right partner. 

So, how can you ensure that outsourcing works for your business? 

Outsourcing will only work in the long term if both parties approach it as a partnership. It’s all about collaboration. With commitment and effective communication from both sides, long-term success can be achieved, however, it does require investment of time to get it right; treating it as a one-time deal will limit its potential. 

So, it’s all about finding your perfect partner, one that aligns well with your business, not only in terms of skills and experience, but also in terms of culture and values. This requires thorough research and careful evaluation. 

There is no doubt that outsourcing can help you to unleash your law firm’s potential by allowing you to focus on your core competencies while delegating other activities to external experts. This can lead to increased efficiency, cost savings, and access to specialized skills and resources that may not be available in-house freeing up time and resources to drive growth and also provide the flexibility to scale operations up or down based on business needs, making it a powerful tool for unlocking and maximizing a company’s potential. 

But you must approach it with the right attitude if you want to unleash the potential of your people and your business. Getting the right partnership and outsourcing can serve as a strategic tool to help law firms reach new heights of success in 2025 and beyond. 

Richard Culberson, CEO of Moneypenny & VoiceNation, North America, a global leader in outsourced call answering, live chat, receptionist teams and customer service solutions for business large and small, handling over 20 million calls and chats for thousands of organizations. Moneypenny has an award-winning culture, with over 1,250 people across the US and UK. At the centre of this culture is a vision that if you combine awesome people with leading-edge technology, you will supercharge your people and your business, delivering gold standard customer experience and service. Richard is passionate about building teams that leverage new business models and technologies, driving growth and scaling business.

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Richard Culberson

Richard Culberson

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As reported by Non-Billable, Rooke said the market "has moved from conversations around 'what is legal finance?' to 'how can legal finance support this particular case?'" He described a client base that increasingly includes well-capitalised businesses rather than claimants who cannot otherwise proceed, noting that Burford is "increasingly talking to large corporations about whether it makes sense to spend their own money on litigation or deploy that capital elsewhere."

Rooke, who spent six years as a commercial litigator at Freshfields before moving in-house at Royal Bank of Canada and joining Burford in 2022, sits on the firm's London underwriting team with a focus on competition disputes, including collective proceedings before the Competition Appeal Tribunal.

On underwriting, he said the analysis reduces to three questions: "do we think the case is going to win? If it does, when will it win? And how much will it win?" He added that Burford is overlaying its institutional experience with "an AI database containing information from the investments we've looked at across different jurisdictions, types of case, claimants, defendants and law firms."

Rooke also linked funding to changing law firm economics, suggesting capital can sit behind conditional fee arrangements, discounted rates with success uplifts and damages-based agreements. External investment in law firms has been possible for years, he said, "but I think AI is going to turbocharge that."

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The class period opens on the day Cochlear issued FY26 underlying net profit guidance of A$435 million to A$460 million, representing growth of 11% to 17%, and closes the day before that figure was withdrawn. On April 22, 2026, the company cut guidance to A$290 million to A$330 million, citing softer third-quarter sales and heightened uncertainty over fourth-quarter Middle East sales. The shares fell 40.7% in a single session, the largest one-day decline since listing, erasing more than A$4 billion of market capitalisation.

The claim alleges that conditions not reflected in the original guidance included slower growth in hearing healthcare markets, declining US consumer sentiment, difficulties in the Nucleus Nexa rollout in the United States and Germany, softer trading from January onward, and lower gross margins alongside restructuring costs.

Cochlear said it "denies the allegations set out in the claim and will be defending the proceedings," attributing the downgrade to factors that were not foreseeable when guidance was given.

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Levitt Robinson Solicitors acts for the claimants, with TF Grundy as Victorian agents.