An addendum to reflections on structure in Indra’s law department

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 example, regional groups of is lawyers report to a regional head as well as to a business unit head lawyer.

Several examples of matrix reporting because of global operations have appeared here (See my post of Feb. 15, 2006: Unilever has international overlays of reporting; June 24, 2007: Cadbury Schweppes; May 2, 2008: Siemens and global structure; July 24, 2009: IBM’s regional matrix; and July 1, 2010: P&G has geographic matrix reporting.). Other instances undoubtedly come up in widely-dispersed law departments like those of McDonalds, Coca-Cola and other international giants (See my post of July 4, 2009: solid line and matrix with 11 references and 3 metaposts; and Dec. 15, 2009: regional inside counsel with 8 references.)..