Save money by relocating part of your legal team to a lower cost city

Citi announced that it will “hive off a chunk of its London legal function to Belfast,” according to Legal Week, Vol. 9, May 24, 2007, at 1. On the order of 39 jobs will be based in Belfast. The huge bank, with more than 1,000 lawyers in its global legal function, has been trying to cut costs by moving support functions such as the law department from major financial centers, where the cost of living is very high, to less costly regional outposts.

This kind of shift could be seen as an on-shore offshore – use workers in a lower-cost place instead of those in a higher-cost location (See my posts of June 15, 2006 on the use of associates from lower-cost cities; and Sept. 21, 2005 on using lower-cost members of a law department.).