Clifford Chance

Clifford Chance acquires CAS in Newcastle

Leading global law firm, Clifford Chance has today announced that it has acquired the Newcastle business of CAS, Carillion Advice Services, an award-winning provider of paralegal and commodity managed legal services. CAS will be fully integrated with Clifford Chance, complementing the firm's existing client service model.

Michael Bates, Managing Partner for Clifford Chance in the UK explains, "Our priority is always to ensure that we are best placed to provide the optimum service to our clients.  By working with the CAS team, we will enhance our ability to provide extremely cost-effective, efficient and high-quality service on a range of low complexity legal tasks as an integral part of our overall client offer.  To date, we have delivered this work either through our Legal Support Centre in India, or through working with other third parties including legal outsourcers.  The addition of the team in Newcastle, with their well-recognised expertise in unbundling, developing processes and applying the latest in legal tech, will enable us to provide clients with another option from within the firm."

CAS is built around a team of some 60 paralegal level legal advisors. Originally developed as part of Carillion's in-house legal team, over the past six years, CAS has extended its services to support other law firms and in-house legal teams.  CAS specialises in large projects for clients and low to medium complexity routine work, including: document review, due diligence, e-disclosure and litigation support.

The CAS team, which will continue to be led by Lucy Nixon and based in Newcastle, will report into Michael Bates and to Oliver Campbell, Clifford Chance's Global Head of Client Services Solutions, who is also responsible for the Legal Support Centre in India.

Oliver Campbell comments, "We have been very impressed by the CAS team in Newcastle. They bring a huge amount of expertise in areas that are already an important priority for the firm, such as legal tech and process-driven service delivery.  Their client-centric culture, enthusiasm and proven entrepreneurialism is also a good fit and I see many opportunities for clients, and for both teams as we move forward."