Data on a 50 percent increase in the average number of “non-legal” roles held by general counsel

Deloitte & Touche’s “Forensic Corporate Counsel Survey 2010: do today’s corporate counsel hold all the cards?” asked a question of its respondents about the number of “non-legal” roles the top lawyer holds.

They found that during the past five years, “the number of non-legal roles held by a GC in an organisation has increased from approximately 2.4 roles to 3.7 roles, the most common non-legal roles being company secretary and those associated with risk, compliance and regulatory responsibilities.”

We might wonder what constitutes a ‘legal role” according to those who conducted this survey? Handling litigation, reviewing contracts, preparing corporate governance documents, I suppose. It feels to be an artificial line, however, to exclude corporate secretarial work. Company secretary may have a different meaning in the UK, which seems to have produced the bulk of the respondents.

Without more detail, you can’t figure out this finding, let alone judge its meaningfulness. The report and this bit of data is cited in The In-House Perspective, April 2011 at 9.