On the heels of my post that argues for a more limited role of a legal department than a recent white paper advocates (See my post of Jan. 29, 2009: extremely broad scope of responsibility asserted for legal departments.), I started thinking about turf wars among a CEO’s direct reports.…
“Essentially, legal departments must ensure accountability, defensibility and transparency in a company’s processes, systems, protocols, structures, operations and controls.” That prodigious comes from a White Paper on Legal GRC: November 2008 at 4. I disagree. It is not the responsibility of a general counsel to manage the entire company, which…
A General Counsel Roundtable survey in 2007 collected from one hundred law departments the “non-legal” functions that fall to the general counsel. Compliance ranked third after Corporate Secretary and Corporate Governance (See my post of Jan. 18, 2008: “Corporate Governance”.). Fine, but the percentage of respondents who said that Compliance…
A recent survey by the General Counsel Roundtable collected from one hundred law departments the “non-legal” functions that fall within their general counsel’s set of responsibilities. The corporate secretary function, for example, came first, with almost 90 percent of the general counsel having that role (See my post of Dec.…
One of the contributors to Yale Law School’s Career Development Office employment guide for law students is a senior lawyer at Medtronic. In his bio he writes: “In 1990, after British company Grand Metropolitan PLC acquired Pillsbury, it cut the management staff including the legal department roughly in half.” Other…
Data of close to 100 law departments, from predominantly US companies, show an interesting pattern. The pattern involves the percentage of lawyers located away from corporate headquarters. Approximately one third of the companies had all their lawyers clustered at headquarters. Approximately one third (actually 42%) based one-third to two-thirds of…
If a law department staffs a lawyer in a foreign country, that lawyer probably concentrates first on the support of the business unit that provides an office (See my post of Jan. 11, 2009: Microsoft’s generalist policy.). That being likely, it is also likely that the business unit provides secretarial…
At first blush it might seem that a law department with several international locations would incur materially higher overhead costs. Conversely, a geographically centralized law department, with nearly all of its lawyers in one location, might enjoy what we can call economies of co-location. That first blush might turn to…
In the simplest meaning of the term “to report to someone,” the supervisor whom you report to is the one who can hire you, fire you, decide what your pay is, and decide on promotions. The sound byte is hire, fire, pay and promote. Another aspect of a reporting relationship…
“Unlike in law firms, where the reporting lines are obvious to everyone, there is ambiguity in corporate reporting structures, and they usually do not work in reality as they appear on paper.” Not so, say I. Official reporting lines are always clear in law departments, contrary to this assertion in…