Law Department Administration

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By: Kris Satkunas, LexisNexis CounselLink

A vast majority of corporate legal departments withheld hiring new law firms to handle their significant legal matters in 2015, according to the LexisNexis CounselLink 2015 Year-End Enterprise Legal Management Trends (ELM) Trends Report. The study concludes that while most legal departments stayed with their incumbent law firms in 2015 to handle their significant legal matters, there were exceptions to the rule – most notably in the areas of litigation and corporate matters.
Continue Reading Law Departments Stick with Firms They Know: Report reveals exception for significant corporate and litigation matters

By: Brandon Leatha & Charlie Platt, iDiscovery Solutions

The year is 2004, and Google quietly releases a new offering called Gmail. It’s invitation only, and there is little fanfare. Techies pass invitations amongst themselves, and a cult following grows, but generally the world fails to take notice. The year is 2006, and Google launches Google Apps. Again, it’s seen as an interesting experiment but generally not taken seriously by the industry. Then small businesses and startups start noticing the service is free, and for small businesses, free is a critical differentiator. They can access their documents from the office, home, the road, an airplane or anywhere they find themselves. It’s collaborative; multiple users can edit the same document at the same time. This is how they work, and it gives them a competitive edge. The year is 2010, and Google announces that Google Apps is no longer in beta, and that almost 2 million companies are now using it. The year is 2015, and Gmail has just passed 900 million users and Google Apps has over 60 percent of the Fortune 500 as users.

Continue Reading 10 Key Legal Considerations for Cloud Solutions: There will be investigations and e-discovery request, are you ready?

MCC Interview with Bryan H. Jones, KPMG LLP

There was a time, not all that long ago, when a company’s general counsel was expected to weigh in on purely legal issues from the sidelines. No more. In a new report based on interviews with business executives, “Through the Looking Glass,” KPMG details just how broad the GC role has become – and how challenging. Below, one of the report’s authors, KPMG partner Bryan Jones, discusses the expectations of the modern GC and the tools needed to meet them. His remarks have been edited for length and style.
Continue Reading Corporate Execs Offer Recipe for GC Success: Counsel who lead from the front with legal insight and business acumen exceed expectations

By: Sarah Sawyer, Inventus, LLC

The use of mobile devices in the workplace is an ever-evolving practice. When organizations first started taking advantage of increasing mobile technology, particularly cellphones and laptops, most implemented “company owned, personally enabled” (COPE) policies. The mobile device remained the property of the organization, and the employee used it primarily for work-related tasks. With COPE, the type and scope of mobile devices is restricted, affording the organization the ability to fully understand the technology of a limited number of devices, thus providing them with predictability when the data stored on those devices becomes discoverable.
Continue Reading The E-discovery implications of BYOD: Clear policies are a must when employees take control of mobile devices

By: Kimberly Stein, Thomson Reuters

“Doing more with less” is increasingly the mantra that corporate law departments are living by. A recent survey by Thomson Reuters found that reducing outside legal spend and managing limited internal resources are two of the top challenges cited by general counsel and decision makers in law departments.
Continue Reading Knowledge is Power – and Powerfully Efficient: Law departments deploy KM systems to leverage valuable information assets

By: Joe Calve, Metropolitan Corporate Counsel

In a post this summer to the Seyfarth Shaw blog, Seytlines, Ken Grady, the firm’s “Lean Law Evangelist” and former CEO of SeyfarthLean Consulting, conducted a fascinating thought experiment. Here is how he framed it: “The chatter today is about a world with different types of large law firms. In this essay, I’m going to ask a different question, ‘Is there a future with different types of law departments?’ ”
Continue Reading Backstory: Imagine…

By: Joe Calve, Metropolitan Corporate Counsel

Last month, in the sweltering depths of a tumultuous summer, the Conference of Chief Justices (CCJ), an association of top state judicial leaders, and its civilian counterpart, the Conference of State Court Administrators (COSCA), took an important, if little noticed, step toward righting a badly listing civil justice ship. Both groups threw their weight behind a report by CCJ’s 23-member Civil Justice Improvement Committee (CJIC), led by Chief Justice Thomas A. Balmer of Oregon, beseeching state judicial leaders to take 13 specific steps to improve the U.S. civil justice system. The report, entitled “Call to Action: Achieving Civil Justice for All,” is a joint venture of the National Center for State Courts (NCSC) and the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System (IAALS), with funding provided by the State Justice Institute (SJI). Joining Balmer’s committee were a number of corporate law department representatives, including David G. Leitch, Global GC of Bank of America; Tom Falahee, Assistant GC of Ford; and two retired GCs, Thomas Allman of BASF and Kim Brunner of State Farm.

If acronyms are any indicator, this effort just may have legs.

As we’ve written here previously, the planets…
Continue Reading Civil Justice Playbook: A Call for Customer-Centric Courts

By: Barbara Darkes, McNees Wallace & Nurick LLC

I learned in my undergraduate studies in criminal justice that the most successful deterrents to unlawful behavior are the likelihood of getting caught, the certainty of punishment, and the swiftness of the punishment. In 30 years, that has not changed, whether it involves street crime, white-collar crime, regulatory compliance, or compliance with any other laws, rules, or policies (even Mom’s rule to not skip school!).

In recent decades, we seem to hear more than ever about corporate wrongdoing. Is that because of the continued expansion of media sources and people’s constant connection to those sources? Perhaps. The better question, which is the focus of this article and should be the focus of every company, is how to avoid being the next headline.

Leaders in many corporate organizations, especially smaller companies (defined by the U.S. Federal Sentencing Guidelines as any company with less than 200 employees), lead with a misconception that corporate compliance and ethics training is not a concern for them. They take the position, “I’m a good, law-abiding person, so is my leadership team, and we are surrounded by people just like us. We hired them and we don’t hire

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Continue Reading A Game Changer: How your company crafts and implements a compliance program makes all the difference

By: Lloyd M. Johnson Jr., Chief Legal Executive LLC

For NetApp Inc.’s legal department, the autobahn isn’t just a ribbon of pavement slicing through the German countryside. In symbolic terms at least, it’s the route to the future.Three years ago, the Silicon Valley data management giant adopted the idea of using the autobahn to describe its legal department strategy. Like the famed European highway, the NetApp Autobahn emphasizes speed, efficiency and meticulous engineering, while evoking themes of international scope and destination.Continue Reading NetApp Legal Team Races Ahead: Playing a key role in achieving the company’s business goals

By: Andriana Georgallas, Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP

Recently, in GSE Environmental, Inc. v. Sorrentino (In re GSE Environmental, Inc.), on a motion for judgment on the pleadings, the Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware held that the Chief Executive Officer’s claim for unpaid compensation payable in stock constituted an equity security rather than a general unsecured claim. The facts of GSE Environmental are an all too familiar story in the bankruptcy context: Company files for chapter 11, but certain employees, or in this case executives, were not paid their full compensation before the petition date. Whether such unpaid compensation is treated as a general unsecured claim or equity securities can have a tangible effect on the employee’s recovery in the case. GSE Environmental serves as one example of a variation of unpaid compensation that may be treated as an equity security.

Background

Charles Sorrentino served as interim president and CEO to the debtors, GSE Environmental, Inc. and GSE Holding, Inc., as of July 1, 2013. Pursuant to his original employment agreement, Sorrentino was earning $186,000 per month payable in cash. A month later, the parties amended his agreement to provide that $100,000 of Sorrentino’s monthly compensation would

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Continue Reading Get to the Back of the Line: Delaware Bankruptcy Court Holds C-Suite Stock Compensation was Equity Security Not General Unsecured Claim