Bring foreign-country lawyers to headquarters for a stint of training

When a legal department has lawyers who are admitted in a foreign jurisdiction and have only practiced there, it is important to integrate them with the mainstream department. You might bring them to headquarters for a period of training and enculturation. Two examples of this method are in Inside Counsel, June 2009 at 55.

Target Corp. established its first overseas legal office in India in 2005. “To build the team, Target recruited people with Indian law degrees who were working on graduate-level U.S. law degrees to participate in a 90-day or more internship at Target headquarters. Those who were successful were offered a job in Bangalore.”

A second example is United Technologies Corp., which recruited international lawyers from LLM programs and “brought them in to work at the US headquarters and then placed them in the international operation.” Both techniques make sense.