Two’s Company, Three’s a Crowd

The last several weeks, we’ve seen a number of press releases regarding the vendor relationships with the software giant Microsoft.

The announcement-spree was kicked off with a release by CPA Global reporting that Microsoft is currently employing a “team of between three and five qualified lawyers at CPA [that] are handling multi-jurisdictional legal support work, including legal research… in CPA's offices in Gurgaon.” This was the second major public release by CPA after the Rio Tinto engagement in June 2009.

Coming quickly on the heels of the CPA release was a separate release from Integreon. The details of the release reported Integreon to be the “exclusive provider of offshore managed document review” on behalf of Microsoft. This was one of the first major corporate engagements publically announced by Integreon.

The contract management portion of the Integreon-Microsoft engagement is reported to be handled primarily by Intgreon’s onshore delivery facilities in Fargo, North Dakota with “eight full-time contract specialists.” This is reflective of the importance of onshore-offshore engagement structures for legal outsourcing engagements as reported in the recently released Fronterion 2010 Global Sourcing Study and also featured in The Lawyer.

While not a legal service engagement, the third and most recent vendor announcement came from Infosys. It is reported that Infosys is servicing Microsoft to “manage internal IT services for Microsoft worldwide” including “IT help desk, desk-side services, and infrastructure and application support from multiple global centers.”

Who knows who will be next in the Microsoft vendor release bonanza?