Ashurst is placing 17 of its 34-strong document production team in London at risk of redundancy as part of a plan to offshore their work.

It follows the firm's huge northshoring move last year when it opened an office in Glasgow to carry out support work more cheaply.

Now it plans to use an offshore provider to take on the sort of out-of-hours support work (typing up dictations, amending documents etc) which is currently provided by an in-house London team. The firm told RollOnFriday a London "hub" of staff would remain, with work either performed by them or by the offshore provider, who is yet to be appointed.

One source up for the chop wasn't too impressed with the decision, noting that, "in their words: "you cost us too much". Nice."

Offshoring document production: How it might work

An Ashurst spokeswoman said the model proved successful in the firm's Australian offices, where doc prod work has been emailed to South Africa and back for over a year.

She said, "We will be consulting with the team in London which could unfortunately lead to some redundancies in the team. As part of the consultation process, we will explore methods for avoiding and minimising this".