My general inclination is that secretaries should report to an administrator, if there is one, because that person can handle coverage issues, workload imbalances, and squabbling. The lawyers (and perhaps paralegals) they support should contribute significantly when it comes time to evaluate the admins’s performance and certainly direct them day…
In 2003, the American Management Association reported that about a third of the 52 public companies it surveyed had a Chief Governance Officer. The functions of that officer included “monitoring compliance with legislative and regulatory requirements affecting corporate governance, performing ongoing assessment of the Board’s structure and governance practices, [and]…
At the ACC 2004 Annual Meeting (Course 611), a Division General Counsel for TIAA-CREF, a major financial services company, deciphered this reporting mouthful. The three Division General Counsel who support business groups report solid line to both the general counsel of the company and to the leader of their business…
A recent post of mine (August 21, 2005) cited a general counsel who contends that the last step you want to take to reduce litigation costs is to hire a litigation lawyer. He favors letting business lawyers, assisted by outside counsel, resolve claims and lawsuits. A number of blogs picked…
With the departure of the company’s chief legal officer and group secretary, this UK-based company promoted one person to the CLO position, reporting to the CEO, and someone else to the secretary position, reporting to both the CEO and the Chairman (Corp. Counsel, Sept. 2005 at pg. 68) Splitting the…
An article in the Metropolitan Corporate Counsel (James Ewing and Gerald Kral, July 2005 at 40) stated: “Organizationally, the formal compliance function most commonly resides within the CLO organization.” (See my post of May 20, 2005 questioning the linkage of law and compliance.) Agreed, but consider the authors’ rationale. The…
Most law departments these days have some lawyers dedicated to business units and the others, legal specialists like litigators, employment and environmental lawyers, support them. Should those specialists report to the head specialist lawyer – the AGC Real Estate Law – or to the head business unit lawyer – the…
At a consulting client, the paralegals and the secretaries in the different practice groups report directly to the lawyer heading the group. One of them, overseeing a dozen or more lawyers, has more than 20 such staff reports! Inefficient is the mildest term for this misuse of senior lawyer time.…
For a recent consulting project, I used these two shapes to describe on the non-lawyer side how law departments are changing composition. The older model had many lawyers, a few paralegals, and many secretaries – the hourglass. Progressive law departments these days are hiring more paralegals, rafts of them sometimes…