The Minnesota Star Tribune has published an article about the latest layoffs at TR West Legal Publishing and provides us with this sobering fact……”The Minnesota Department of Trade and Economic Development said more than 425 employees were laid off from the company’s legal and editorial services group between Jan. 1, 2009, and this past Oct. 31. “
Here’s the introduction to the piece
Read the full report at? http://www.startribune.com/business/110272089.html?elr=KArks:DCiU1OiP:DiiUiD3aPc:_Yyc:aU0c7Ok:Pia_eyckciU
The revelation last week that Thomson Reuters’ legal division is cutting 60 of its 7,000 workers on the Eagan campus is the latest in a reduction of several hundred employees since 2009, thanks to the recession’s impact on law firms, outsourcing some jobs to India and the Philippines and the continued shift from print to online legal resources.
The Minnesota Department of Trade and Economic Development said more than 425 employees were laid off from the company’s legal and editorial services group between Jan. 1, 2009, and this past Oct. 31. Some of the departed qualified for federally funded retraining because their jobs were considered lost to foreign shores.
The recent headcount reductions ended a decade-long employment surge from 4,000 in 1998, when Thomson acquired West Publishing, to a peak of about 7,400 in early 2009. Part of the hiring resulted from information technology jobs added to support the legal division, as well as Thomson Reuters’ globe-spanning tax/accounting, health care and financial information businesses.
“We have moved some content-production work to our global service centers in India and the Philippines,” said John Shaughnessy, a Thomson Reuters official. “It’s primarily keyboarding, data entry and some software testing. We’re not just serving lawyers in the U.S., but in different parts of the world. We’re trying to follow the sun in updating legal databases. We have Westlaw service in China and Japan. And we just acquired a legal publisher in India.”
Shaughnessy pointed out that the Eagan campus of about 7,000 employees still boasts more than the 6,800 of four years ago.
The legal group had an operating profit decline of 9 percent in the first nine months of 2010, to $803 million, on revenue that increased 1 percent to 2.7 billion. The entire professional division’s operating profit, including legal, declined by 6 percent, to $1.05 billion, on revenue that increased 2 percent to $4.1 billion during the first nine months of the year.
