The Third Annual Law Department Operations Survey asked its respondents to check off to whom do they report. The report that resulted, at 14, states that 44.1 percent report directly to the general counsel as compared to 37 percent in 2009. The writer touts the improvement in the “chain of…
On the website of eHow.com you can read a thumbnail description of several corporate staff functions, including legal. Very peculiar in several respects, it is pasted below. The bracketed numbers I inserted follow the odd words or phrases I comment on after the quote. ‘The legal department receives legal reports…
The top lawyer of Anheuser-Busch InBev, Sabine Chalmers, describes her 150-lawyer department in Practical Law, March 2011 at 80. In accordance with her dual title of Chief Legal & Corporate Affairs Officer of the $36.8 billion company, she and her team also have responsibility for “corporate affairs.” The profile briefly…
“The board of directors decides the outlines of the staff, and structural organization of the legal and compliance function. Among other things, it decides whether the functions are joined or separate, whether they are handled centrally or not, to whom these functions report (board of directors, audit committee, CEO, etc.)…
The lead article in Corp. Counsel, March 2011 at 67, profiles seven experienced administrators (aka business managers, managing directors, directors of administration, etc.). The piece on Danette Gallatin of The Williams Companies had a couple of sentences not so much about that role but about dispersion of law departments when…
A friend sent me word of a compliance function survey being conducted jointly by PricewaterhouseCoopers and Compliance Week. One question asks “To what extent is your compliance function directly responsible for or involved in the following areas?” It then asks for each area about whether the compliance team is “directly…
Comments I made earlier about Indra’s structure said nothing about an additional layer in law departments and a frequent cause of hard-to-resolve management issues: a geographic reporting matrix (See my post of Jan. 11, 2011: Indra’s law department structure.). Indra itself has not expanded yet to the point where, for…
A comparison of legal services provided in-house by lawyers of German companies and U.S. companies picks out several differences. According to page 88 of the General Counsel Benchmarking Report for 2009 by Otto Henning & Co., contract issues (Aligemeines Vertragsrecht) dominate German departments, with 95 percent of them handling it…
One of the many interesting parts of the impressive General Counsel Benchmarking Report for 2009 of the German consultants, Otto Henning & Co., discusses the total cost per in-house counsel (Anwalt) of centralized and decentralized law departments. I haven’t had translated all the German text (at 56) but I assume…
The General Counsel Benchmarking Report for 2009 of the German strategy consultants Otto Henning & Co. comes in a very impressive book, though entirely in German. The participants in the study were 56 departments, all from the Fortune 150 of Germany. Among their responses, they provided data on their reporting…