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Over the past decade, legal departments have built formal capabilities to manage risks once missing from any register: cybersecurity exposure, data privacy obligations, sanctions screening, and ESG disclosure. Each found its place after a single event revealed a business assumption that would never change without scrutiny. Now, workforce geography is on the brink of the same reckoning, and most risk registers still need to catch up.
The pattern is familiar now. The visa fee structure changes. A processing queue that once took weeks stretches into months. A court challenges a rule companies used to build hiring plans. Legal teams review the change, HR updates its cost models, and the organization waits to see what remains before making any long-term commitments. That response made sense when these shifts were rare. But it no longer works now that they’ re routine. This isn’ t just a US issue. Sponsorship costs, eligibility criteria, and processing timelines are changing in the United Kingdom, the European Union, and other jurisdictions, each on its own schedule and with its own politics.
The familiar pattern
The real mistake doesn’ t react to any single change but treating each one as an exception instead of proof of a new normal. Once regulatory volatility becomes a permanent condition, not just an occasional surprise, the key question shifts from‘ How do we comply with this new rule?’ to‘ How much of our workforce strategy relies on this rule staying the same?’
That’ s a question of concentration risk, and legal teams know how to ask it in other areas. Few general counsel would let a single vendor, a single governing-law clause, or a single data-processing agreement anchor a business-critical function without first considering what happens if that option disappears. Workforce location deserves the same scrutiny but rarely gets it. The idea that a role must sit in a specific country was usually never a decision, just something inherited.
It’ s time to examine that assumption directly. For many roles, requiring a specific country is a historical default, not a conscious business choice. Someone made that call once, long ago, and nobody revisited it. Deciding whether a role needs to exist and where it should sit is strategic, not just compliance, and should come earlier in workforce planning than it usually does.
Once regulatory volatility becomes a permanent condition, not just an occasional surprise, the key question shifts from‘ How do we comply with this new rule?’ to‘ How much of our workforce strategy relies on this rule staying the same?
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