“All design can be understood as ideology embodied.” This aphoristic quote, from Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires (Knopf 2010) at 201, refers to the architecture – the design – of the Internet. Decentralized, open, tolerant of all uses, multi-layered, opposed to bigness, a…
According to author Tim Wu, four industries have been identified as “public callings”: telecommunications, banking, energy, and transportation. Utilities such as water and sewage companies could be added to the list. “Each plays an essential role in the workings of the nation and the economy, and thus these are the…
Based on a survey of its members where 810 of them responded last year, the Society for Corporate Compliance and Ethics (SCCE) produced data on the reporting lines of the chief compliance officer (See my post of July 23, 2010: compliance and ethics with 24 references and 2 metaposts.). In…
A study conducted in 2009 by OPI, a French intellectual property consultancy, looked at the reporting position of intellectual property departments (patents, trademarks, designs and models). As summarized in 2010 Intelligence Report & Directory Series of Leaders League at 81, OPI found that 34.5 percent of the time in French…
The most important characteristic of any position is the person it reports to. As befits that crucial status, this blog has accumulated at least 94 posts on reporting lines. In turn these created eight metaposts. Some have to do with individual lawyers and their reporting lines (See my post of…
Two weeks ago Ben Heineman published a blog post about how compliance officers should co-report to the general counsel and to the chief financial officer. Roy Snell, the CEO of the Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics, disagreed with the reporting to the general counsel. I have quoted Snell’s comment.…
The legal department of Harrah’s Entertainment, profiled in Corp. Counsel, Jan. 2011 at 82, has 62 people, of which 22 are lawyers. That means 40 of them are not lawyers, a quite high distribution. Very typically US law departments of much size have a one-to-one ratio of lawyers to non-lawyers.…
A profile of Indra, a $3 billion IT services company headquartered in Spain, lays out broadly how its 50 lawyers are organized. Iberian Lawyer, July/Aug. 2010 at 27, describes one group as “Secretariat, supporting the Board’s needs and the regulatory, compliance and corporate governance aspects of being a Spanish listed…
Monitoring competitive moves in the intellectual property space could fall to in-house patent lawyers or it could fall to the R&D department. A French intellectual property consultancy, OPI, has found that 70 percent of the time in French companies the research group takes on that responsibility. What the situation in…
This lawyer manqué rarely gets to cite Supreme Court decisions so when I read in Corp. Counsel, Almanac 2010 at 13, about a February decision, I seized the opportunity. The Court clarified a conflict among the federal circuits as to how to define a company’s “principal place of business” for…