“Get off email and get out of your office,” Stephen Swanson, Abu Dhabi Investment Co.’s chief legal officer, exhorted attendees at a recent conference. “Getting in front of your business colleagues will give you valuable information.” This excellent advice appears in the June issue of Legal Week and its summary…
The Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics disseminated a seven-question survey to its members regarding board training. The Society got back 171 responses and published a summary, written by a partner of Jeff Kaplan, one of my guest bloggers, in its Compliance and Ethics Mag., Vol. 6, June 2009 at…
Among the many reasons the Hartford Financial Services Group won Corporate Counsel’s 2009 award for Best Legal Department is that in the fall of 2008 it launched a quarterly newsletter on ethics, compliance, and privacy. They call it The Hartford Advantage and it is available only to employees (and only…
Most lawyers think of continuing legal education almost entirely in terms of the need to freshen their knowledge of a substantive area of law (See my post of May 25, 2008: CLE with 30 references.). Few think of the softer sides of their practice, such as writing skills, public speaking,…
A quote in a recent article in the European Lawyer pointed out a perceived shift in discourse recently from “value” to “cost.” General counsel used to speak about value; now, more bare knuckled, they demand lower costs. Whether or not that shift is underway, I thought of Oscar Wilde’s quip:…
Some general counsel and the lawyers on their team believe in “lawyer exceptionalism.” They haughtily maintain that they are exceptions to the rules that apply to others in the corporation. Wrong, for the most part. Here are some comments. “Finance has the craziest ideas about accruals and budgets” (See my…
You may want to try this to encourage your lawyers to learn more about the business they support (See my post of May 7, 2009: learn as much as you can about your company’s business.). At a retreat, Karen Wishart, the General Counsel of TV One, assigned her legal team…
You build strong trust and respect with your clients if you never make them feel dumb. They may do something or ask something that seems so basic to you, but never make them feel silly. That alienates them; it patronizes them. This rock-solid advice came from a panelist at the…
A session at the most recent SuperConference concerned what inside lawyers need to know about the business of the company they support. Marti Wronski, General Counsel of the Milwaukee Brewers, made the interesting point that ambitious lawyers shouldn’t “wish for too much too soon,” in part because the higher you…
General counsel want to show clients the value produced by the legal team, but often haven’t a persuasive way to convey that. The new general counsel of Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, Christopher Dewees, wants the efforts of his dozen or so attorneys to be better understood by clients. He explains…