At the start of a piece in ACC Docket, April 2007 at 96, Phil Crowley, a senior lawyer with Johnson & Johnson, mentions that “our law department has grown from 40 lawyers in one office location to over 240 lawyers in more than 35 office locations around the world.” Since…
James Nortz, the director of compliance for Bausch and Lomb, worries in ACC Docket, April 2007 at 94, whether the nascent field of dedicated ethics and compliance professionals will “persist and grow over the long term” (See my posts of Jan. 17, 2006 on the Ethics Officer Association; and Oct.…
William Mostyn, Bank of America’s Deputy General Counsel & Corporate Secretary, among his other duties keeps track of some 2,000 subsidiaries. In his spare time, Mostyn is Chairman of the Board of the Society of Corporate Secretaries & Governance Professionals (SCS&GP). In a profile published by Met. Corp. Counsel, Vol.…
This snippet of law department history comes from the UVa Patent Foundation website, with emphasis added: “In 1998, the Patent Foundation of the University of Virginia embarked on a new initiative to develop an in-house patent department. Over the next year, the Patent Foundation hired two in-house patent attorneys, a…
CounseltoCounsel, April 2007 at 8, lays out a number of steps the legal department of McDonald’s has taken to improve oversight of workers’ comp claims (See my posts of May 19, 2006 #4 about the huge payments by the City of Los Angeles on workers comp and April 23, 2006…
Ben Heineman, in Corp. Counsel, Vol. 14, April 2007 at 88, notes that “As general counsel, I had a strong ‘dotted’ line to lawyers in the field working in the business divisions …” Why did a general counsel who now writes and speaks so frequently and passionately about all that…
Not uncommonly, large law departments grant the title “general counsel” to a senior lawyer who has responsibility for the legal issues of a major subsidiary, division, region, or operating group: General Counsel EMEA, General Counsel, Power Operations, General Counsel North American Enterprise Group. That lawyer serves as the top lawyer…
When the general counsel is promoted to become CEO, the successor general counsel usually reports to that executive, a lawyer (See my post of Jan. 27, 2006 regarding promotions of general counsel; Feb. 10, 2006 #1; March 13, 2006 #2; April 10, 2006 #3; Oct. 2, 2006 #3; April 12,…
Knowledge sharing, it turns out, depends crucially on proximity. Research described in Cal. Mgt. Rev., Vol. 49, Winter 2007 at 25-27, which studied interactions between engineers and scientists in terms of the distance of their workstations from each other, found that the separation distance dramatically affects the probability of weekly…
It’s unusual for an in-house lawyers not to have a private office, but some law departments have adopted the so-called “open plan” arrangement (See my posts of Feb. 20, 2005 and Nov. 8, 2005 on SEI; and Nov. 19, 2005 and May 7, 2006 on cubicles for lawyers.). Call me…