“Control is a central theme in organization theory, economics, and business history,” according to Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton, Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths & Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based Management (Harvard Bus. School Press 2006) at 68. One of the most influential postmodern philosophers, Michel Foucault, saw power animating…
Having just written about the ethics programs at Lockheed Martin (See my post of Oct. 3, 2008: four activities to promote ethical awareness.), I bestirred myself to sort through my posts on ethics and what’s been written here about expectations of the law department’s role. Several posts propose that the…
During a recent PLI conference, James Comey, the general counsel of Lockheed Martin, described several ways in which that company impresses on its employees, continually, the importance of ethical behavior. Comey’s law department supports each of these activities. A monthly newsletter to all employees contains a “police blotter” on the…
The Gucci Group law department, under general counsel Cheryl Solomon, has more than 30 lawyers and paralegals located in London, Italy, France, the United States, Tokyo, and Hong Kong. That dispersion of lawyers around the globe, described in ACC Docket, Vol. 30, Sept. 2008 at 152, underscores the trend of…
Although 95 percent of the lawyers practicing in Bombarier report only indirectly to the company’s general counsel (See my post of Sept. 19, 2008: global and decentralized law department.), there are two measures of direct control exerted by that lawyer (Daniel Desjardins). According to a special supplement to the ACC…
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…
At companies with geographically dispersed in-house counsel, some locations have only a handful of lawyers or even just a single lawyer (See my post of Sept. 16, 2008: multiple foreign locations of lawyers and legal staff.). There are on average around five lawyers per non-headquarters office of McDonald’s. Or consider…
The ever-thoughtful Sabine Chalmers, chief legal officer of InBev, lays out clearly the typical obligations of a company’s Corporate Secretary. Her piece in ACC Docket, Vol. 26, Sept. 2008 at 14, states that “the role requires strong organizational skills” particularly for the timely and careful production of Board of Director…
It is rare that a legal department has any significant say in how its physical space is laid out. It has not been rare for this blog to chip in on office configurations (See my post of March 21, 2006: hoteling at Sun Micro; June 5, 2007: office layout; Feb.…
For example, Aon scatters approximately 250 legal professionals in 17 countries, McDonalds has lawyers in 19 countries, and Carrefour has lawyers in even more – 30 countries. But those aren’t the most spread out. BP operates at least 36 offices with lawyers, HSBC has some 650 lawyers worldwide in 40-some…