Corporate policies and legal departments

Corporate policies cover many, many activities of company employees. They make up one form of codified behavior (See my post of Oct. 10, 2006: policies of law departments compared to practices; and Oct. 25, 2006: guidelines compared to policies.).

Sometimes the lawyers have responsibilities to state, interpret or enforce company policies (See my post of June 5, 2007: legal department’s role in managing corporate policy statements.), one of the most common being the code of conduct (See my post of Feb. 20, 2009: Codes of Conduct with 5 references.). And law departments spawn their own thickets of policies regarding their practices.

The vast topic of corporate policies extends far beyond legal departments, but I rummaged through my posts to see where I have written about those that that affect legal departments. Many posts do (See my post of Nov. 13, 2007: Dell and the involvement of procurement in outside counsel selection; Sept. 17, 2005: Cargill policy on minor litigation; Aug. 27, 2005: Australian government policy on outside counsel retention; Nov. 13, 2006: all retention of outside counsel must pass through the legal department; and June 7, 2006: BHP Billiton policy regarding retention of external counsel.).

Even more generally, some posts refer to company-wide policies (See my post of Nov. 26, 2006: IT and HR policies; Feb. 4, 2006: email surveillance policies; July 14, 2006: signing powers for executives; Feb. 28, 2006: officer positions and titles; June 9, 2007: flextime and compressed time; and June 15, 2008: in-place promotions and salary increases.).