Major and minor responsibilities of in-house counsel

A good example of a law department that has assigned its lawyers a major responsibility and several minors comes from top of mind, Vol. 5, 2006 by Kirkpatrick & Lockhart Nicholson Graham at 4.

Radio One’s law department has four lawyers, each of whom is a generalist but also a specialist for one or more fields of expertise. One lawyer, for example, provides general business counsel and is also the company-wide resource for SEC and corporate governance issues.

If a law department has not grown large enough to sustain a specialist lawyer, it makes sense to charge each generalist to stay abreast of, to minor in, one or more specialty areas (See my post of Nov. 30, 2005 on specialty lawyers in law departments, and references cited.).