Routine UK legal queries to be answered by HSBC bank’s offshore center

Corp. Counsel, Vol. 15, April 2008 at 100, reports that a team of four lawyers of HSBC Holdings, the global banking giant, will respond to routine queries on UK law from its global service center in Malaysia’s capital, Kuala Lumpur. The pilot effort, if successful, may expand to handle questions from other regions. The article points out that this program “is possibly the first major U.K. financial institution to make such a move” (See my post of March 17, 2006: HSBC’s decentralized legal structure.). Clearly, it is a big step beyond the tasks we most hear about being done offshore, document review and standardized contracts to handle legal questions.

The article also mentions that BT Group has sent offshore some of its legal work, “which last year expanded its existing offshore legal function in New Delhi with two new outposts in Sao Paulo and Buenos Aires to support its U.S. operations.”