The firm has signed a five-year multi-million-pound deal with IT service provider SAVVIS, which already provides a similar offering to both Allen & Overy (A&O) and Mayer Brown Rowe & Maw.
SAVVIS will host Linklaters’ critical
The firm refused to release an exact value for the deal but A&O’s similar five-and-a-half year agreement with SAVVIS was worth £5.5m. A&O became one of the first firms in
Linklaters made the move because it had outgrown both the power and space available internally and decided that with data centres costing around £1,200 per sq ft to build, and with high energy costs, it would be cheaper to outsource.
The firm’s support office in
The agreement, which took effect earlier this year, is not expected to result in any job losses although it will free up the equivalent of two permanent members of staff for other tasks.
The news comes a month after the magic circle firm announced a three-year agreement with Unisys to cover the support and maintenance of its global data centre and infrastructure, including servers, storage and printers.
Linklaters also signed an agreement with Perot Systems last year for the use of its offshore development staff and it is also considering further outsourcing agreements, though not on a large scale.
Simon Gilhooly, global head of technical systems at Linklaters, told Legal Week: “We do not have a programme of outsourcing but we are looking at the things that are not core to our business and trying to find partners to work with — SAVVIS is well positioned.”
Linklaters’ agreement with SAVVIS comes as it emerges that A&O is in the process of extending its arrangement with the IT company. In addition to using SAVVIS’s data centre to store its servers and storage networks, the firm will also now be handing over the management of the infrastructure to SAVVIS. Around 13 jobs will be affected by the change, but some will be re-deployed within A&O.
IT director David Burwell is set to leave the firm in August to launch his own consultancy. He will be replaced by a Jason Haines, who is currently global chief technology officer for PricewaterhouseCoopers.