In a brief profile of Beat Hess, Group Legal Director for the Royal Dutch/Shell Group of Companies, the Practical Law Company noted that the company has approximately 650 lawyers worldwide (excluding tax lawyers). Those lawyers have offices in over 50 countries. Hess takes much credit for having all Shell lawyers…
In a group of 23 law departments in companies with more than $20 billion in revenue, the average percentage of lawyers at the largest site was 63 percent. This finding, from the Hildebrandt Law Department Survey, surprises me because these are huge companies, with multi-national operations that all need legal…
Integrity Research Group and Altman Weil reported results from their study of compliance functions (Legal Week, Vol. 7, Oct. 13, 2005 at 84). Two-thirds of the survey’s participants have created a compliance function separate from the legal function. Of those two-thirds, one-third of the compliance functions report to the CEO,…
The chief intellectual property officer (CIPO) is a position that has recently been created at several large companies, including IBM, HP, SAP, Yahoo!, Boeing, GE, and Microsoft. The CIPO is the senior officer of the company responsible for maintaining and enhancing a company’s return on investment for its IP assets,…
Risk Management, the Chief Financial Officer, Internal Audit, direct to the CEO, a Board Member, a composite Compliance, Ethics and Investigation (CEI) function? I have even heard it raised that the compliance function should report to a committee of the Board. John McGuckin, the General Counsel of Union Bank of…
Many law departments have organized a chunk of their lawyers around and in support of business units. Further, they designate one lawyer to be the person any client can call from the business unit. That single point of contact (or “go-to” lawyer) then figures out who among the business generalists…
Managers of law departments may think they are doing the right thing when they focus on selecting the right person for a position. But some researchers, cited in the Financial Times, Aug. 11, 2005 at 7, argue that it is the position that is structured for high performance. The article…
I have been collecting Bartholomew GCs, those who wear many hats. From 40 AZ Attorney 12 (Nov. 2003), here are two with a half dozen on their heads. In 2003, the General Counsel and Secretary of Dial Corporation, Chris Littlefield, oversaw two full time lawyers and two contract lawyers, as…
For those law departments with several litigation management attorneys, a perennial issue revolves around the question of (a) should we keep the litigators together as a group or (b) should we assign the litigators to groups of business unit lawyer? Note a common wrinkle. Often, litigators are handling legacy law…
According to the National Law Journal, in 1997 the 200 largest firms had 67,853 lawyers. The same year, according to Corporate Legal Times, the 200 largest law departments had 20,930 lawyers. Using the same sources, the largest law firms in 2000 had 88,012 lawyers and in 2004 had 102,882. The…