Law Department Management Blog
In the portfolio of John Chou, general counsel and secretary of AmerisourceBergen, fall four groups. The law department includes 21 lawyers and 24 other members. Those 45 are less than half of his total complement because it also includes government affairs, regulatory affairs, and corporate security. All told, the “law department” counts about 110 staff. These demographics emerge from GC Insights: What Multinational General Counsel Value Most (ACC 2012, supplement to ACC Docket) at 12.
The $80 billion pharmaceutical services companies has perhaps the lowest ratio of lawyers per billion I have ever seen for such a huge company. With a quarter of a lawyer per billion, it makes anorexic departments with but a lawyer or two per billion look hefty. That nano-metric deserves some explanation. Might there be a passel of hidden lawyers in the business units? Might outside counsel spending be very high?
My major point, however, has to do with corporate security. That function, I thought, was very unusual to be under the general counsel, although some late-arriving data suggest I am wrong (See my post of March 1, 2012: roughly one-out of three GCs in a survey also ran corporate security.). To my surprise, that post stands alone among the 7,203 published so far as a reference to the corporate security function.