LEGAL
Insights & Trends
Stay current with this timely collection of best practices, peer profiles, and trending topics for corporate counsel
Small but growing legal departments often struggle to define exactly when it's time for them to invest in technology for their legal department
Whether in-house lawyers like it or not, numbers and analytics have become a big part of your job when it comes to managing your legal department and its limited resources and budget.
The recent 2015 General Counsel Excellence Report touched on yesteryear lawyer stereotypes and was a reminder of how times have changed.
Eighty-four percent of legal departments outsource half or less of their company’s legal work to outside counsel, with the average department using outside counsel for only 26 percent of their work.
In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and shrinking legal department budgets, one solution soon became clear: retain business-savvy attorneys to handle work in-house rather than hire outside counsel.
Is your company looking at an abundance of work that it can’t address quickly with the department’s current resources? This common challenge is often addressed by either retaining additional outside counsel or increasing the department’s headcount — both of which may be expensive roads to travel.
From a Filipino-American community along the sandy beaches of Hawaii, to ivy-covered halls of Brown University on the East Coast, to a global roll-out of his growing legal department, Eric de los Santos has been planting the seeds of diversity and inclusion all along the way.
It's often easy to forget that the most powerful weapon in any legal arsenal is the people who make up the team. If your team is running on all cylinders, there's no stopping you
Leadership is something that is inherently good in most every situation, but really difficult to define – you often "know it when you see it," but can't reduce the concept into an easy description that's helpful in situations requiring it or for those who want to cultivate it.
While the legal industry may be slower to adopt change than other industries, change has come to it nonetheless. The types and degree of change appear to be accelerating, leaving many both on the legal department side and law firm side scrambling to keep up.
Recognizing the need to ensure that privacy and data security protections remain effective as data collection capabilities evolve, lawmakers throughout the world have been vigilant on the regulatory and enforcement fronts.
The primary legal mechanism relied upon by thousands of European and American companies to easily move data between the two regions is gone.
If a corporation using the cloud to store electronic information becomes embroiled in an investigation or litigation, the corporation must consider relevant laws before gathering, reviewing, and producing responsive electronic data.
Critics contend that Hillary Clinton's use of the private e-mail system for official communications raised important network security and government transparency concerns.
In a world of highly visible and catastrophic data security breaches, we would expect that corporate chief information security officers (CISOs) would be valued and respected in their organizations.
Corporate directors and officers may increasingly be targets of shareholder derivative lawsuits in the wake of the surge of regulatory actions and private litigation around data breaches.
With more than 70% of global organizations expecting to experience a breach in the next 3 years, companies of all sizes must prepare a cyber security strategy to respond to evolving cyber attacks. Take the quiz to see if your company is ready.
Times have changed, laws have changed, tolerance has evaporated, money is the life blood of crime and governments want to stem the flow of money laundering.
The increasingly complex demands of our changing regulatory environment alongside the effects of globalization have elevated the importance of understanding due diligence for general counsel to new heights.
The due diligence process has long been an integral part of the risk landscape. In the last few years, even more emphasis has been placed on proper information gathering and screening processes.
The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) was formed in 1989 as an intergovernmental body designed to prevent, detect and deter money laundering, terrorist financing and other related threats to the integrity of the international financial system.
Money laundering has become so rampant and woven into the fabric of our world’s economy that the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimated in 2009 that criminal proceeds amount to approximately 3.6 percent of global gross domestic product (GDP).
Risk and Compliance heads spoke to the changing regulatory landscape and what the current financial and compliance challenges mean for them practically.
While the GC oversees the legal affairs of the company and is seen at times as the company's legal advocate, the CCO has specific responsibility for the company's compliance program, responsible not only for helping to prevent misconduct but also for identifying misconduct that may have occurred.
From harm to company reputation to actual financial fines levied, recent Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) enforcement actions confirm that noncompliance can be incredibly costly.
The most common and most important question for any securities practitioner is the cornerstone question, "Is it material?"
Putting in place and reviewing law firm guidelines on a yearly basis can seem like a tedious process for in-house counsel. However, having these guidelines in place can clarify the company-law firm relationship and save a great deal of time.
Contracts for international transactions contain a mix of the familiar and the exotic. If you ignore the familiar, you end up reinventing the wheel. If you ignore the exotic, you might be in for unpleasant surprises.
Contracting is one of the most crucial activities in determining the success of any business arrangement.
We've all heard that law school doesn't always prepare new attorneys for the challenges of practice in the "real world." What does a new corporate counsel need to know?
Nearly half of all general counsel feel that their company is not ready for a cyber security breach, while others wrestle with writing a social media policy
Companies must develop policies, practices, and procedures that support effective management of employee use of advanced communications technologies in the workplace
Top questions and issues regarding Bitcoin, from its beginning, how it is acquired, federal and state regulators' opinions
Key actions a GC can take in the first few months on the job to ensure success
Make sure that document discovery against your individual employees doesn't serve as an entrée into your corporate files.
The first months in any new role have a tremendous effect on how an employee is perceived.
Corporate counsel must budget and control litigation expense, oversee the litigation, and take steps to ensure objectives are met.
Both the bad guys and the good guys are aggressively pursuing the data of individuals and organizations. Legal counsel play a critical role in applying basic protective measures.
Immediate and easy steps to control research costs, drive productivity, and connect legal research to value-based billing.
Sales departments have revenue numbers and marketers have click-throughs. What numbers should a legal department be watching?
In consulting with hundreds of legal departments, one surprise is how few have an accurate idea of how much they spend on outside counsel. What other business unit can get away with this?
Understand the range of agreements that implicate the protection and treatment of data and related intellectual property rights.
Amid the data breaches at large companies, plus the knowledge that Big Brother really has been watching through the NSA, every corporate counsel ought to be concerned.
Governments are placing more constraints on the collection and use of consumers' personal information. It's likely that your organization already faces privacy compliance obligations.
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