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Research on onshoring of legal services by Professor Steven Vaughan featured in Law Society Gazette

10 January 2020

Research by Emily Carroll (Birmingham Law School) and Professor Steven Vaughan (UCL Laws) identified a ‘sidelined workforce’ of solicitors and paralegals based in the satellite, ‘onshore’ offices of elite law firms.

Steven Vaughan, UCL Faculty of Laws Senior Lecturer

Matter Mills and London-Lite offices: exploring forms of the onshoring of legal services in an age of globalisation’, published in Legal Ethics, discusses the ‘new class’ of regional lawyers who are sometimes treated differently to their colleagues based in the London offices.

Emily Carroll, Senior Lecturer at Birmingham Law School and Professor Steven Vaughan, Professor of Law and Professional Ethics at UCL Laws, argue that “a number of the legal professionals working in the onshored offices are doing work that is perceived as legally “lesser” than that which is undertaken by their colleagues in the London office…and therefore perceived by London lawyers as shameful or degrading.”

Key findings of the paper have been covered in an article published today in the Law Society Gazette (‘Regional staff treated as second-class by London firms, research suggests’).