A special supplement to the ACC Docket, Vol. 26, Sept. 2008 after 80, offers some details about the law department of the Canadian company, Bombardier. The department has “120 lawyers located in 17 jurisdictions around the world.” Bombardier has two main businesses: aerospace and transportation. Each of those two businesses has a vice president for law, who reports directly to the CEO for the business with a dotted line to the company’s senior vice president and general counsel.
Since the core group of lawyers at headquarters, consisting of finance and M&A lawyers primarily, amounts to a mere half dozen, 95 percent of Bombardier’s in-house lawyers report only indirectly – on a dotted line – to the general counsel (See my post of Jan. 1, 2006: General Electric’s decentralized reporting on the same lines.).