Risk Management

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By Rachel Hadrick / McNees Wallace & Nurick LLC

Distracted driving has become one of the leading causes of motor vehicle accidents and fatalities in the United States. In 2014 alone, Pennsylvania saw nearly 14,000 crashes involving a distracted driver, including 49 deaths. At least 46 states have made an effort to combat this growing problem in recent years by prohibiting texting by drivers. Many people are aware of these laws, and even the penalties they carry. Perhaps not so obvious, however, are the growing areas of liability flowing from the practice of texting while driving. Is liability limited to drivers? Can police search a driver’s phone after an accident? Can companies be liable if they facilitate, or even encourage, drivers to use their phones while driving? State courts and legislatures have addressed all of these issues and more.Continue Reading Texting and Driving – Evolving Theories of Liability: It isn’t just drivers who may be liable. Phone makers may be on the hook.

By David Hechler, Metropolitan Corporate Counsel

The Civil Justice Playbook sometimes cribs its best material from the Criminal Justice Playbook. What follows is a prime example.

In early February, the fraud section of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Criminal Division posted a seven-page document that nobody seemed to notice. It’s called Evaluation of Corporate Compliance Programs [https://www.justice.gov/criminal-fraud/page/file/937501/download] [or bit.ly/2lEphmk], and it’s no wonder it glided under the radar. DOJ posted 89 press releases on its site in February, but there wasn’t one about this. (Maybe the authors should have asked the president to tweet about it.)Continue Reading Civil Justice Playbook: DOJ’s Missed Guidance:Corporate compliance programs would do well to take a long look

By Trisha Anderson, Inventus LLC

According to the U.S. Census, there are over 83 million millennials. They make up over a quarter of the nation’s population. The growth of this demographic has had an inevitable impact on the demographics of the workforce. By the year 2020, millennials will account for 46 percent of all employees.Continue Reading Millennials Are Leading—Is Your Company Following?: A new generation of employees is setting the pace for modern communication

By Candice Lang, AlixPartners LLP

Properly managing the personally identifiable information (PII) of employees and customers has become a primary concern for corporate counsel and risk managers. It’s no wonder given the massive fines regulators are dishing out. In 2012, the Federal Trade Commission fined Google $22.5 million for misrepresenting the information it collects on its users. More recently, the Federal Communications Commission slapped a $25 million fine on AT&T stemming from the company’s lax internal data security practices that allowed the Social Security numbers of more than 200,000 customers to be accessed and sold to criminal organizations.Continue Reading Managing Privacy Risks in E-Discovery Data Collection and Processing: Understanding data privacy regulations for personally identifiable information

By Yvette McGee Brown, Jones Day

Introduction: Yvette McGee Brown, a native of Columbus, Ohio, has had a varied career. She’s been a common pleas court judge, she ran the child abuse and behavioral health division of a children’s hospital, she made a run for lieutenant governor of Ohio, she’s served on the Ohio Supreme Court, and now she is a litigator at Jones Day. Given the diversity of her career, it seems like poetic justice that she serves as Partner-in-Charge of Diversity, Inclusion and Advancement at the firm. Below, she discusses her career and her role in promoting diversity in the profession, at Jones Day and beyond. Her remarks have been edited for length and style.Continue Reading Definitively Driving Diversity: Exposing students to law firm life early can make all the difference

By Aaron Fluss, FRONTEO

Aaron Fluss, the National Director of Managed Review for FRONTEO, talks about the value of creativity during document review and explains why, despite an explosion of data – and costs related to corralling all that data – technology can’t replace the human touch. His remarks have been edited for length and style.
Continue Reading How to Design Document Reviews To Cut Costs: It all starts with building the right workflow

By Carolyn Casey, AccessData

Ninety-three percent of companies consider their general counsel a member of the executive management, up from 55 percent in 2010, according to Equilar’s General Counsel Pay Trends 2016. GCs have moved beyond solely advising on technical legal issues in large-scale organizations. GCs have long been at the table for strategic planning, compliance, risk management and cyber concerns. The more strategic influence of the chief legal officer is reflected in a median total direct compensation of $2.1 million at S&P 500 companies, per the Equilar 2016 study.Continue Reading Will 2017 Be the Year of the GC as Mega-Risk Officer?: As new threats loom, companies are more dependent than ever on the legal department’s risk oversight

By Metropolitan Corporate Counsel

There’s a new sheriff in lawsuit land.

Displacing California, ranked as the top Judicial Hellhole three of the last four years, is the city of St. Louis, Missouri, which topped the annual Judicial Hellholes report released last month by the American Tort Reform Foundation (ATRF). The #1 ranking in the report, now in its 15th year, capped an amazing rise that saw the Missouri Supreme Court break into the ranking at #6 three years ago, the state of Missouri hit #4 the last year, and the Gateway City soar – or should we say sink – to the top slot in the 2016-17 report.Continue Reading Civil Justice Playbook: Hail the New Litigation Hell

By Iohann Le Frapper, Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC)

The Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) recently elected a global board of directors, with Iohann Le Frapper, general counsel of industrial financing firm ChetWode, named chair. Le Frapper is a truly global in-house professional with stints in the EU, the Middle East and Asia across multiple industry sectors. He discusses below the ACC’s strategic priorities, global reach and educational and networking opportunities for in-house lawyers around the world. His responses have been edited for length and style.
Continue Reading ACC Global Chair Pursues Global Priorities: In-house group seeks cross-border perspective on legal issues

By Karen Rubin, Thompson Hine

Introduction: Karen E. Rubin, Counsel in the Cleveland office of Thompson Hine LLP, has been co-editing the firm’s ethics blog, The Law for Lawyers Today, since it began in 2014. The blog publishes extensively about legal ethics and professional responsibility and was most recently named one of the ABA Journal’s top 100 law blogs of 2016. Ms. Rubin is a member of the Ohio State Bar Association’s Ethics Committee and teaches legal ethics at the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law. As part of a continuing series of interviews focused on top bloggers on the LexBlog Network, MCC spoke with Ms. Rubin about the focus and relevancy of her blog to an in-house readership, touching on ethical pitfalls and traps the in-house community can safeguard against.Continue Reading Blogging About The Law of Lawyering: A look into murky ethics issues and risk management territory