Law Department Management Blog
Profiled in the N.L.J, Vol. 29, June 4, 2007 at 8, Mark Holden, the general counsel of Koch Industries, gives a glimpse of an important topic. Holden’s law department has 26 lawyers, and that legal team “provides litigation services for the stand-alone subsidiaries through separate service-level agreements with Koch companies, except for Georgia Pacific, which maintains its own legal staff” (See my post of May 14, 2005 on service level agreements (SLAs): and June 28, 2005 on profiles of key clients.).
A very decentralized company, one with business units that stand mostly on their own, might have such a decentralized legal structure. Some group of lawyers could help out the other lawyers based on a chargeback arrangement or an SLA. The shared-service model as described here is unusual, but the circumstances were right.