What about companies without law departments?

With nearly 7,000 posts under this blogger’s belt, about 6,999 of them have dealt with companies that have a law department – even if only one lawyer (See my post of July 5, 2011: reasons to hire a first lawyer.). Yet thousands of established, profitable and well-run companies have no employee lawyer. Unblessed, we would all agree, they still manage to navigate the legal rivers.

They use outside counsel Oversight of outside counsel when there is no internal legal team usually falls to the chief financial officer. That oversight is primarily on the cost and payment side. Individual executives retain external lawyers as needed and pay for their services out of the function’s budget. It works, and it will always work, so the companies sans lawyer deserve some respect on this blog.