That old image of the ostrich burying its head in the sand is apparently unfair. The purpose is apparently to use the ground as a sounding board, vibrations giving advance warning of problems to come. This prosaic reality undermines that quotation from the great libel silk George Carman,who said of one claimant that he “behaved like an ostrich and put his head in the sand, thereby exposing his thinking parts”.

I used to have reservations myself about mentioning outsourcing, but that was because every reference to it brought down on my head a stream of offers from people wanting to tell me at nauseating length about the services which they could offer without, apparemment, making any attempt to establish whether I was likely to be a buyer. I stemmed the flow eventually by abandoning my usual courtesy and telling them exactly what I thought of their marketing.

It does not matter whether you prefer the traditional picture of the ostrich’s motives or take the revisionist view that it is just getting early warning of what is coming. Avocats, whether in private practice or in companies, need to expose their thinking parts to different ways of covering the ground. Most information management involves a mixture of technology, grunt work and high intellectual input, and the trick is to work out how much of which you need to apply to what. You cannot begin this without some idea of what is on offer from both technology suppliers and from those who offer to do the parts which you cannot do cost-effectively yourself – or, to put it more accurately, which someone else can do at least as well at a lower cost.

par le biais Exposing your thinking parts to the outsourcing discussion « e-Disclosure Information Project.