Earlier this year, Amazon.com Inc. announced the 20 finalists to host the retail giant's second headquarters—North American cities with, as the criteria specified, a metropolitan population of at least one million and the ability to attract the strong technical talent needed to support the business. But what the establishment of Amazon's HQ2 means for the e-commerce company's legal department is still as speculative as where that location will be.

Amazon general counsel David Zapolsky declined to discuss the issue. But Corporate Counsel spoke with recruiters and consultants who specialize in corporate law departments, and a general counsel whose company recently set up a large office in a second city, to glean some insights into what may happen with Amazon's Seattle-based 800-person global law department when HQ2 opens. (Amazon has said that it plans to announce the final site by the end of the year.)

It may be easier, though, to start with what is not going to happen. Amazon has made it very clear that it intends to keep Seattle as its primary headquarters, meaning the bulk of the legal team will remain there, said Alisa Tazioli, managing director of the Seattle office of Major, Lindsey & Africa, who leads in-house counsel searches throughout the Pacific-Northwest market.

That doesn't mean, however, there won't be any lawyers at the new location, the experts said. For starters, some Amazon attorneys likely would be asked to voluntarily relocate to the new site to get the department effectively set up there, creating management opportunities for some Amazon lawyers, said Jim Wilber of Altman Weil.

Beyond that initial setup, though, the number and type of attorneys at the new site would largely depend on its functions, the experts said. And it's quite possible for the new site to draw on local legal talent, they added.

“To the extent there are people there who have the skills that Amazon is going to need, I expect there will be future opportunities” for local lawyers to go in-house, Tazioli said. The work “will be aligned to whatever is put in that location. I would imagine that labor and employment, for example, would be a need that is local to wherever they go because of the sizable workforce there.”

Sterling Miller, general counsel at Marketo Inc., which recently set up a large office in Denver, used his company as an example of this functionality scenario. Marketo's CEO and several of its senior positions remained at the company's headquarters in San Mateo, California, while its chief financial officer, general counsel and head of marketing moved to Denver, splitting the legal department between the two cities.  

“So if Amazon moves the entire marketing function to the new headquarters, they'd tend to locate the majority of lawyers who work with marketing to that location,” Miller said. “Depending on who they have in the new location and what work they need there, there could be a substantial outpost in the new headquarters.”

The employee-friendly version of this situation would not mandate that any of the lawyers currently working in those areas—marketing, in this example—relocate, but would dictate that new postings specify the new city as the job's location, Miller said.

As Tazioli put it, “Where there's commerce, there's lawyers. How [Amazon] will grow its law department is going to be a boon for [the new] city's legal community.”

This is particularly true, given that the skyrocketing cost of living created by the technology-market boom in Seattle has made it more difficult to recruit top talent to Amazon's primary headquarters, Tazioli added.

“I would think that having an HQ2 is going to give them more options, more opportunity,” she said.

Tazioli said the closest analogy would be the case of Facebook Inc. or Google, which entered the Seattle area drawing on its talent within the developer community.

“Some of their lawyers followed, but as those satellite places grow, then they've tended to add lawyers,” from Seattle, she said.