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Is this a vision of the future? Mark Chandler, general counsel of Cisco Systems, the American internet infrastructure manufacturer, is sitting in a conference room in San Jose, yet, thanks to a staggeringly lifelike video link with the company’s London office (you, too, can have one for $300,000), it feels as if he is sitting across the table.

A few mouse clicks and up on screen flashes a PowerPoint presentation showing how Chandler has been revolutionising Cisco's legal department.

A general counsel in Silicon Valley for 19 years — he is dressed in standard California casual to prove it: salmon polo shirt, khaki slacks — Chandler has been general counsel at Cisco for the past six, overseeing a department that spends $38 million internally and almost $80 million a year on outside lawyers. He has set out to slash those costs by 20 per cent a year.

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“More and more general counsel in the US are being managed like every other part of the business,” he says. “I can tell my boss good stories about how we beat some guy in litigation but what he really wants to know is, ‘Are you going to cost me more than you did in the last quarter?’”

In order to achieve this ambitious target, Chandler has sought to streamline Cisco’s legal operation by embracing the “core-context” workflow model popularised by business theorist Geoffrey Moore.

Cutting through the business school mumbo-jumbo, this essentially means that he has divided the work into the legal tasks that are essential to help the company design, make and sell products — such as protecting its intellectual property rights — and outsourcing or automating those that are peripheral. Cisco has only five lawyers overseeing securities compliance, four in litigation and one in employment; most of that work is farmed out to external advisers.

Chandler has drilled down further so that routine tasks that “won’t bring down the enterprise” if they go wrong are handled either entirely by outside law firms or have been standardised using technology.

Chandler is eager to demonstrate some of these innovations. He brings up on screen a software application for dealing with non-disclosure agreements.

“If we were going to enter into a non-disclosure agreement for the purpose of our discussion — which, admittedly, would be a strange thing to do with a newspaper — basically, I have to fill out a questionnaire. There are some trap doors where, if you answer wrong, you get to talk to a lawyer.”

In other words, a salesman in, say, Hong Kong, can enter talks with a third party without having to first wait days or weeks for permission from a lawyer, unless the agreement calls for something out of the ordinary.

“We do hundreds of these a month,” Chandler says. “It used to be a multi-part form that you would fill out and the canary coloured copy went to the legal department. It was a total waste of energy to circulate all this paper.”

A few more clicks and Chandler is on to demonstrating a tool for renewing contracts.

Let's say a distributor in the UK's contract was expiring on October 15. In the past, someone would have had to draw up a new contract and send it to various parties to sign before, ultimately, it was buried in a filing cabinet. Instead, Chandler has established a system where the legal department and the relevant account manager receive an e-mail when a contract is set to expire; if both approve it, a new document is automatically drafted, e-mailed to each party to sign electronically, and then archived — all without anyone having to actually handle a piece of paper.

Want to see more? Chandler has similar internet-based applications for approving press releases, managing patent applications and monitoring employees’ outside interests for potential conflicts. He has invested heavily in bespoke tools to improve discovery in litigation.

Cisco has also developed a “very, very sophisticated” knowledge management system that allows universal access to documents across the company. This was driven by Chandler’s frustration at obtaining information from head office during a stint in Paris before he became general counsel. Now, he says, “Anywhere in the world, 24/7, anyone who needs access to corporate documents can go get ‘em.”

Not content with establishing this within his own company, Chandler has contracted Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, the San Francisco law firm, to build a standardised corporate secretarial tool that can be adopted by other companies.

“I showed them what I was spending on outside counsel to do all our corporate secretarial work,” he says, “and told them that if they could cut 20 per cent of the cost out, they could do it — but they had to do it through an automated tool that all law firms could use.”

Chandler has also been one of the leaders in developing Legal OnRamp, a service in conjunction with eight other Fortune 500 companies that will allow them to tap into participating law firms’ knowledge databases.

Recently, Chandler's 22-year-old daughter, a school teacher in New York, wanted to know if she could be claimed as a dependant for tax purposes (Chandler subsidises her income). After a quick search on the internet, he found a tax website that gave him the answer he needed: no, she couldn't. Why, he asks, can't that concept, that sort of ease of availability, be extended to company law?

“Take sweepstakes,” he explains. “Every company gives things away. Let’s say The Times decides to have all its reporters get together at a beach one day, and they have a raffle — is that legal? If all the news distributors show up, can you give something to them? We all have the same questions. Why are we paying lawyers hundreds of dollars an hour to go look this stuff up?”

Chandler says there is a growing movement of general counsel in the US ruthlessly looking to cut costs and improve efficiency — and not just at technology companies. Indeed, he singles out drug and tobacco companies, both of which have had to contend with large-scale litigation, as leaders in legal innovation.

“Virtually every big organisation has a couple of people in the legal department who are focused on technology,” he says. “I don’t know a big company that isn’t doing something. Everyone’s under a lot of pressure to find ways to be more efficient.”

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