Bill Deckelman spent three months in early 2017 brainstorming with a group of about 20 people, looking for ways to save money for the soon-to-be-combined legal departments of Computer Sciences Corp. and Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Most of the available solutions involved offshoring or one-off technology initiatives. How many lawyers would he need in India or the Philippines to handle contract work for the newly formed DXC Technology Co.?

“We got nowhere. It was one big circle,” Deckelman says. “We figured out we had to do something totally different.”