The Shaw Group, a $5 billion engineering and related services group, announces that its general counsel for the past eight years, Gary Graphia, has been promoted to “Chief Legal Officer and Corporate Secretary.” Shaw has brought on board a former law-firm partner, Cliff Rankin, to become the “General Counsel and Corporate Secretary.” That must give them enough corporate secretaries! Note also the elevation of chief legal officer over general counsel (See my post of March 22, 2006 as to the distinction.).
To the point of this post, however, the release emphasizes that during the promoted GCs time, the legal department has grown from 3 to 24 lawyers (with 18 other staff) and completed three major acquisitions “as well as numerous smaller transactions. “In addition, the Company has completed seven public capital markets transactions totaling over $2.7 billion, and three increases to its bank credit facilities, the most recent being to increase the facility to $850 million.”
Those metrics of accomplishment evidently count highly to senior executives of that company, and probably other companies, and yet the transactional ones are metrics that law departments do not track and compare for purposes of benchmarking.