White & Case has served as outsourcing counsel to some of the most prominent companies in the world, including financial services leaders, international food giants, multinational telecommunications companies, and media and technology leaders.

Global Resources and Expertise
We have the global capacity and experience to advise on every legal aspect of an outsourcing transaction, including employment, tax, insurance, privacy, data protection, regulatory, cross-border and intellectual property issues. Outsourcing reaches into every corner of the globe, including developing markets where White & Case has decades of professional experience helping its clients assess and overcome commercial, legal, regulatory and structural risks. Our global presence thus also enables us to support our clients on cross-border and multi-national outsourcing projects. Our team is multi-lingual and has US, EU, Latin American and Asia Pacific lawyers who can join forces to provide the highest quality services.

Our resources and experience enable us to support all of our clients' sourcing goals during all phases of an outsourcing project, from the request for proposal and vendor selection process, through post-contract relationship management and adjustment. Additional resources include a strong in-house data-processing and economic analysis unit to ensure high quality representation in matters requiring quantitative analysis.

In serving our clients, we adhere to the following guiding principles: permanent contacts throughout the entire lifetime of a project; flexibility and high responsiveness; thorough understanding of the technical and commercial background of the project; consensus-driven and goal-oriented negotiations; maintaining agreed roles and seamless cooperation with other external consultants; and support of internal communications and project management.

IT Services and Specialised Business Processes
The Outsourcing Practice Group has represented clients in outsourcing IT services and specialised business processes that go beyond basic non-core processes. These sophisticated transactions involve unique challenges and raise issues with respect to precautionary measures and control. We have been at the forefront in negotiating the transactions and drafting the documents that allow our clients to face these challenges and mitigate the associated risks. As a result of those transactions we have a knowledge of relevant markets, the market players, and their respective approaches; standard documentation for a multitude of transaction types; a realistic view of the achievability of negotiation goals; expertise as to the structuring of a project in terms of content and time; and strategies to avoid post-signing negotiations and disputes.

Given the depth of our Firm's activities in the financial services and insurance industries, we have developed a particular outsourcing expertise in regulated industries and have lawyers in our outsourcing group who are former regulators themselves. For example, White & Case is primary US technology counsel to a major global financial institution. Our work for them runs the gamut from traditional IT outsourcings, Business Process Outsourcings (BPOs), privacy and related issues.

BPO transactions have included outsourcing of:

employee recruitment processes (RPOs) enterprise records management email recovery mortgage analytics operation processes loan servicing and asset management back-office foreign exchange trading processes back-office statement production processes company and market research

user acceptance testing call centers procurement and supply chain processes back-office email capture processes application management security; and disaster recovery

ITO transactions have included outsourcing of:

• infrastructure;
  
• application development and maintenance;
  
• network and other telecommunications services;
  
• desktop support; and
  
• helpdesk services.

We also advise on all questions that arise in connection with sourcing (whether in the context of outsourcing, offshoring, nearshoring, backsourcing or insourcing), and on all aspects of the development, distribution, procurement and use of IT systems. Our expertise covers the following areas:

• structuring and strategizing with respect to optimizing clients' sourcing goals, whether as a straight outsourcing, establishment of captive service providers, build-operate-transfer or other models;
• support of IT projects, particularly software development and systems integration, including SAP implementations;
  
• structuring and negotiation of all types of licensing arrangements, including the development of tailor-made license models or the sale of software or database rights (click here for representative software and IT licenses and development agreements);
  
• development of service models as well as the drafting and structuring of service contracts of all sorts (particularly provision of application services (ASP agreements), software maintenance, support, service level agreements and consulting agreements);
  
• advice as to the structuring and implementation of joint ventures and strategic alliance, e.g., for the joint development of software or the operation of trading and processing platforms; and
  
• advice on daily issues such as the development of standard contracts for the purchase or distribution of hardware, software and related services.