Cross selling is when a partner at a firm you use introduces you to another partner there who has a skill or knowledge base the introducer hopes is advantageous to you. This common practice has good points and bad points. The most obvious advantage is confidence. You trust the partner…
Some in-house lawyers prevent partners from law firms having direct contact with senior executives, partly from a fear of being upstaged and supplanted. “If the partner comes across as smarter, more experienced, more likeable, what will become of me?” A natural fear, so it was good to read in the…
These four practices, lit up by Law Tech. News, March 2009 at 39, and its profile of Gardere Wynne Sewell jking@gardere.com make sense to me. I keep composting scraps of ideas for how law departments can improve the environment (See my post of March 11, 2009: conservation steps for law…
Readers, please send me your law department’s tips for going green. Here are four more ideas. Provide trash containers that have round holes for cans and bottles. Recycle toner cartridges. Discard computer equipment responsibly. Encourage car-pooling. Along with those four steps, this blog has cited several others that law departments…
A research paper concludes that general counsel have a positive effect on controlling insider trading during so-called “blackout windows.” The paper, “The Impact of the General Counsel on Corporate Governance,” by Alan Jagolinzer, Daniel Taylor and Daniel Taylor and David Larcker (May 27, 2008), gathered insider trading policies of 260…
An interview in the McKinsey Quarterly, 2009, No. 1 at 146, of Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, should hearten Google’s in-house team and most in-house lawyers. Toward the end of a long session, the McKinsey interviewer asked Schmidt about dangers he foresees “as the Internet continues to develop.” Schmidt…
A good example of fuzzy overlap between a legal department and other functions lurks with Codes of Conduct. How far should a general counsel claim to be the ethical beacon for the company? To what degree is ethical behavior a matter of laws and attorneys? What lines exist between the…
No. I disagree with this quote, which comes from ACC Docket, Vol. 27, Jan./Feb. 2009 at 58. Sure, if you run a company that specializes in consulting on compliance solutions, like the author of that tendentious quote, every corporate problem is a risk-creating nail for your compliance hammer. But the…
Some general counsel aspire to have their law department operate at a “world-class” level (See my post of May 16, 2007: misguided goals embedded in the aspiration.). By that term they mean their team should perform at the level of the best law departments. That is a rhetorical goal, not…
Standard & Poor’s plans to assess enterprise risk management (ERM) practices at non-financial companies. The assessments will look at four components of ERM that S&P considers common to all industries: “risk-management culture and governance, risk controls, emerging-risk preparation, and strategic management.” From a write-up in CFO, Vol. 24, March 2008…