It's no secret that company law departments are increasingly being held to the same standards of cost-effectiveness as other business departments. (For example, that was one of the themes of a speech that Mark Chandler, general counsel of Cisco Systems, recently gave at the Northwestern School of Law's Annual Securities Regulation Institute.) As a result, law departments are being expected to do more with static or shrinking budgets.
OUTSOURCING, OFFSHORING
Any business that's under pressure to perform is likely to ask itself whether it could save money (or at least avoid management distractions) yet maintain or even increase quality by getting someone else to perform some of its noncore functions -- hence "outsourcing." The shrinking world ushered in by developments in information technology has given rise to the variant "offshoring," in which the work is performed outside the United States in locations that offer compelling cost advantages.
