As global competition sharpens and evolves, companies need fast access to new technologies and applications and ever-cheaper support for day-to-day operations. Outsourcing is changing to meet those needs. With a globally recognized practice, Hunton Andrews Kurth LLP is at the forefront of those changes. We help our clients navigate the challenges of leading-edge robotic process automation, cognitive computing, cloud computing and “as-a-service” structures, as well as more traditional business processing offshoring and IT infrastructure outsourcing transactions. Our lawyers are aware of the risks and benefits inherent in these critical relationships and are able to skillfully navigate the balance between cost reduction and quality control to maximize value.

Outsourcing transactions are critical to the ongoing operations of an organization and involve many complex issues that require subject matter experience from a wide variety of practice areas. Our team includes outsourcing-savvy lawyers from our tax, privacy and data security, intellectual property, immigration, benefits, and labor and employment practices.

Our outsourcing lawyers are leaders in the industry and have decades of combined experience working on various transactions involving:

• Information Technology. While information technology outsourcing (ITO) has been around for decades, it is quickly changing and evolving. We make it our business to stay on top of these changes and the technologies driving them. Our work in this area includes outsourcing of data center, desktop, network, managed security and telecom services.
• Application Development and Maintenance. Whether as a standalone transaction or a part of a broader outsourcing solution, our lawyers have executed dozens of applications development and maintenance (ADM) transactions across a multitude of industries and in multivendor marketplaces. In addition to traditional ADM transactions, we have executed transactions involving the development and maintenance of our clients’ legacy systems, enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications and a host of Oracle/PeopleSoft/JDE, SAP, Workday and similar applications.
• Business Process. Business process outsourcing (BPO) transactions (including finance and accounting, insurance underwriting and claims management, customer care, HR, facilities maintenance, procurement, training and other back-office activities) typically touch more areas within an organization than traditional IT outsourcing transactions. All these processes offer opportunities for substantial savings and process improvements. Structured thoughtfully, some can drive new revenue. At the same time, these processes can raise significant challenges, often involving intricate compliance mechanisms and internal controls and presenting significant potential liability if not handled appropriately. BPO transactions that involve multiple processes delivered from multiple/changing source jurisdictions can become exponentially more complex. In addition, these transactions often represent a multiprocess outsourcing, as the outsourcing of many business processes often involve SAP, Oracle, or other ERP implementations and hosting arrangements, which further increase their complexity and criticality.

Our lawyers have handled processes as diverse as:

• finance and accounting (including A/R, A/P, general ledger, budgeting, financial reporting, and travel and entertainment reimbursement);
• customer care;
• call center;
• human resources (including payroll, benefits administration, recruiting and talent management);
• retail store operations;
• insurance claims processing;
• distribution;
• procurement and supply chain;
• mortgage and loan servicing;
• data analytics
• training; and many more.

International Practice/Global Capacity
With firmwide resources of more than 1000 lawyers, we are spread across critical jurisdictions in the United States, Europe and Asia. Our lawyers have executed transactions involving buyer locations in the United States and Canada, Western Europe, and many countries in South America and Asia (frequently, all at the same time). Delivery locations include North America, India, the Philippines, Latin America and many others. We also maintain an active worldwide network of experienced counsel who enable us to support our clients wherever they do business.

Vendor/Supplier and Advisor Experience
Our market knowledge is deep. We have extensive experience negotiating with the major service providers, including Accenture, Atos, IBM, DXC Technology, CGI, CSC, Fidelity, Fujitsu, NTT Data, TCS, Dell, Capgemini, Conduent and its predecessors, Convergys, Cognizant, HCL, Wipro, Infosys, Genpact, AWS, Microsoft and Workday, as well as many others. We have existing relationships with, and appreciate the involvement of, each of the major sourcing consultancies, including ISG, KPMG, Wavestone/Everest, Gartner, Pace Harmon, PA Consulting and others.

Management, Disputes and Restructurings
We help manage transactions from beginning to end. The contracts we build include dozens of market-tested management tools intended to maintain healthy relationships, discipline performance and encourage innovation. We train our clients to use those tools consistently and effectively and advise them as they wield them in real time. When breakdowns occur, we help mediate disputes and restructure problem areas. Where disputes cannot be reconciled, our team includes litigators with deep experience in prosecuting complex IT and BPO cases.

Leading Global Privacy Experience
Privacy, information management and data security strategies are key components of almost every outsourcing transaction. One of our key differentiators is the coupling of our outsourcing experience with the resources of our privacy and cybersecurity team, which Computerworld ranked as the top privacy advisor for all four surveys. Our ability to deal with the myriad issues raised by moving and processing personal and sensitive data across the globe is quite helpful to clients as they construct their web of data flow and services. We stay at the leading edge of privacy policy development around the world through our think tank, the Centre for Information Policy Leadership at Hunton Andrews Kurth.

We have extensive experience working on hundreds of transactions involving all major vendors and outsourcing locations, including the following recent engagements:

• Advised a major US health system with respect to seven simultaneous transformational outsourcing transactions with a total contract value over $1 billion, including IT, finance and accounting, revenue cycle management, health information management, and data warehousing and analytics functions. The transactions involved novel supporting arrangements to assure employment and income continuity for affected staff.
• Handled an application maintenance and global service desk transactions for one of the largest auto parts manufacturers in the world.
• Advised on comprehensive multiprocess transactions on behalf of two of the largest retailers in the US and one of the largest franchisors in the world.
• Advised on IT infrastructure, multiprocess HR and contact center outsourcings for a national consumer services company.
• Advised on a multiyear extension of a comprehensive IT outsourcing and finance and accounting add-on transactions for a global consumer packaging company.
• Handled renegotiations/disputed transactions totaling approximately $9 billion in value.
• Advised on multiple transactions in the retail, financial services, transportation, health care, energy and media industries.
• Advised on multiple transactions involving onshore, offshore and multishore delivery models, and sole-source, captive and multisource supplier delivery models.