A staff function, sometimes pervasively involved with a general counsel for its services and often crucially dependent on legal support, is Human Resources (See my post Jan. 23, 2006: training HR staff about legal issues; and May 10, 2006: most legal departments support HR functions.). For its part, HR personnel…
No posts have defined this term but some posts have commented generally on those who report to the chief legal officer through no intermediate person (See my post of June 7, 2006: number of reports to general counsel; Dec. 9, 2005: direct reports in large law departments; Sept. 27, 2005:…
In 2005, Ernst & Young obtained surveys from 95 companies, mostly from the Fortune 1000 and highly regulated industries. One question asked on the survey, as laid out in a report in November 2005 at 9, was “Does Compliance overlap with other groups?” Of the four groups listed as having…
In 2005, Ernst & Young obtained surveys from 95 companies, mostly from the Fortune 1000 and highly regulated industries. To the question, “Where does Compliance report?,” 52 percent of the respondents said to the General Counsel. The November 2005 report, at 5, states that about one quarter as many (12%…
Jack Holleran, a principle at Ernst & Young, succinctly states the responsibilities of a chief compliance officer (CCO). Holleran, writing in Met. Corp. Counsel, Vol. 17, May 2009 at 8, notes that the “chief compliance officer does not own any substantive risk area but rather serves as the architect and…
Attendees at a session of the SuperConference learned what inside lawyers need to know about the business of the company they support. For all but a few specialist lawyers, deep knowledge of how the business makes money, how accountants and CFOs think about things, and how the industry moves contributes…
Janet Langford Kelly, Susan Sneider and Kelly Fox, “The Relationship Between the Legal Department and the Corporation,” in Successful Partnering Between Inside and Outside Counsel (Robert Haig, Ed.) Vol. 1, Chapter 16 at 16-19. “A tool that works for the general counsel is to imagine that she is designing a…
Let’s tease some thoughts out of unprepossessing facts from an article by Paul Dacier, the general counsel of EMC Corporation, that appears in Met. Corp. Counsel, Vol. 17, April 2009, at 7. He scatters some figures throughout his piece and I have supplemented them as a platform for these observations.…
A longitudinal study of 4,160 people who became lawyers in 2000 found that only two years later four percent of them served as in-house counsel. That percentage seems high, since rarely do corporate law departments hire lawyers straight from law schools. However, government law departments and prosecutor’s offices do so…
If it makes intuitive sense to keep specialist lawyers (such as those who handle patents, securities, trademarks, major litigation, and antitrust) wherever the most executives are, recent data offers some proof. In the field the lawyers are much more likely to be generalist commercial lawyers than legal mavens. Empirical support…