The other day a wise general counsel pointed out a nuance of reporting lines: his dotted line authority vis-à-vis the lawyers who did not report to him varies in “thickness” according to the subject. As to FCPA measures, with the lawyers who report solid line to a business unit executive,…
A fascinating study looked at collaboration on papers in terms of academics’ physical proximity. Professors and grad students who had offices near each other, it turns out, published papers of higher quality, as determined by subsequent citation counts of their papers. This quantification of proximity’s value appears in the Harvard…
In late 2005, Sunoco’s litigation was handled by various in-house lawyers who were commercial lawyers dedicated to business units. The general counsel then hired a senior litigation partner from Reed Smith, Marilyn Heffley, to create a centralized litigation group. Heffley started by finding all pending cases and transferring responsibility for…
So-called tradable sectors, which produce goods for export and deal with foreign countries, include manufacturing, commodities, and services such as finance, law and engineering that compete globally. Non-tradable sectors such as government and healthcare and personal services have very little or no export or international output. This distinction comes from…
Law departments of US companies can handle internally much of their client’s legal needs, the exceptions being litigation and some relatively infrequent specialty advice. International legal questions make up a small portion of the work (See my post of April 30, 2011: globalization overstated.). By contrast, with a company based…
The Economist, April 23, 2011 at 72, praises a book by Pankaj Ghemawat. His World 3.0 demolishes the world-is-flat argument, proving from many angles that globalization has much more modest manifestations. For example, “according to a study a few years ago, less than 1% of all American companies have any…
A commonplace holds that half the lawyers practicing law privately in the United States, meaning not as an employee of a company, government agency or other entity, practice solo. Behind the shingle is a single. It may be that half the internal law departments – using an expansive term “department”…
Many companies have spun off parts of themselves, thereby sundering their legal departments (See my post of March 12, 2011: spin-offs with 6 references.). Perhaps none of them created a new law department of the size of Motorola Solutions’. According to Diversity & The Bar, March/April 2011 at 14, the…
The general counsel of Winn-Dixie Stores, Timothy Williams, has responsibility “for management of all legal, governance, risk and compliance, and quality systems functions.” The final responsibility – quality systems functions – stands out. I have written amply about the wide scope of functions various general counsel oversee (See my post…
“There are, in essence, only two problems in organizations: how to divide things up, thereby ensuring that the right people do the most appropriate work; and how to integrate the tasks of diverse individuals, functions and teams to ensure that the organization gets things done.” I am no fan of…