Brian Armstrong, the progressive general counsel of Canada’s Bruce Power, was informative and candid about his efforts to demonstrate the performance and value of his department. His 200-page annual report is a compendium of nearly every metric imaginable, according to the long profile of him in CCCA Magazine, Fall 2011…
“We’re not buying pencils!” the implication being that Procurement may know how to buy trivial objects by bullying fungible providers, but sophisticated legal brains far overmatch their petty purview. “Costs matter less than quality and results!” Procurement wants cheap; law wants brilliance and victory, and the twain can ne’er o’erlap.…
Paraphrased in a recent profile, the General Counsel of AOL, Julie Jacobs, “sees the role of corporate counsel as establishing trust both inside and outside the company.” She makes other points in the long piece about expectations for inside counsel, but this one made me sit back and try to…
A recent book states that “when counsel does not act as counsel there are potential issues around professional indemnity insurance and whether or not the indemnity policy will respond.” The quote comes from Benny Tabalujan, ed. Leadership and Management Challenges of In-House Legal Counsel (LexisNexis Australia 2008) at 11. That…
A long-time observer of the corporate legal scene in Australia, Peter Turner believes that “Maintaining professional standards and independence in an increasingly tough and unforgiving business environment is perhaps the greatest single challenge that the in-house profession will face in coming years.” Turner is the former CEO of the venerable…
Has anyone encountered or heard of such a strange request? A lawyer from a fair-sized department wrote me with a strange story. The Board of Directors is looking for “compliance certificates” from each area of the Law Department. My email friend wrote that “While other parts of the Law department…
Some legal problems left in baskets on the doorstep of a law department come from the corporate compliance line. Hotlines, as they are called, generate some wheat for lawyers but mostly chaff. This post offers some snippets I have gathered about help lines. From a small sample of experience, it…
Two of the in-house lawyers profiled in the Columbia L. School Mag., Summer 2011 at 28, singled out the explosion of intellectual property issues. You could say that being a lawyer for Warner Music Group and the Jacksonville Jaguars football team would obviously entail extensive intellectual property rights. True, but…
An article packed with sound advice gracefully written cautions in-house lawyers to call meetings with their clients judiciously. Writing in ACC Docket, Nov. 2010 at 82, the authors urge you to have a clear purpose “and not be overly long (you should generally not schedule a meeting longer than 30…
The law department looks to reduce its budget or headcount by shifting some tasks back to clients, such as minor contracts, administrative help (terminate a secretary in a remote office and have the lawyer there double up on a business unit secretary), review of some marketing material, IT support, etc.).…