Risk Management

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

For in-house counsel, convincing colleagues in the C-suite —or in the rest of the company, for that matter —is rarely a simple matter of saying, “Do it. I’m the lawyer.” Influence and persuasion require strategic thinking, a deep understanding of a company’s objectives and culture, credibility in the organization, and a keen sense of timing.
Continue Reading Influencing the C-Suite: Advice for in-house counsel on the fine arts of influence and persuasion

By: David DiBari, Guy Norman & Luke Toliani, Clifford Chance US LLP

As part of our 2016 series examining global risk, Metropolitan Corporate Counsel convened a roundtable dinner on September 15 at Daniel in New York City to discuss legal and business issues related to combating corruption at home and abroad. It was the third of four planned dinners on the broader topic of global risk that the publication is co-hosting this year with Clifford Chance, one of the world’s leading international law firms.
Continue Reading GCs Focus on Global Corruption and Compliance Challenges

By: Hal Marcus, OpenText™ Discovery (formerly Recommind) & Ari Kaplan, Ari Kaplan Advisors

OpenText™ Discovery (formerly Recommind) recently partnered with Ari Kaplan Advisors to poll partners at leading law firms regarding e-discovery issues. The results are captured in “How Law Firms Are Incorporating Efficiency, the Cloud and Technology to Meet Enhanced Client Demands,” which is available at recommind.com/survey. The report provides an enlightening window into the varying approaches of in-house counsel and their outside firms in terms of technology solutions. Below, Ari Kaplan and OpenText’s Hal Marcus preview the findings. Their remarks have been edited for length and style.
Continue Reading Technological Advances Breed E-Discovery Collaboration: Survey reveals growing alignments and continuing disconnects between firms and clients

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?

By: Kris Satkunas, LexisNexis CounselLink

With the legal industry buzzing about metrics and analytics, corporate legal professionals are eager to get their hands on more information. Rather than diving blindly into the data that is housed in their enterprise legal management solution, a better approach involves identifying, first and foremost, the questions that are most important to the legal department and digging for data to help answer those questions.Continue Reading Peeling the Onion: Six steps to optimize the data mining process

By: Jenny Le, FRONTEO, James A. Sherer, BakerHostetler and Amie Taal, Deutsche Bank AG

Two of the most insidious myths about cybersecurity are that most threats originate outside an organization – Russian hackers, for example – and that it is an IT problem. Amie Taal, a cybersecurity expert with Deutsche Bank, Jenny Le, who runs operations for e-discovery provider FRONTEO, and James A. Sherer, chair of BakerHostetler’s information governance practice, are determined to dispel those myths. Below, they discuss their recent white paper focused on insider threats and the cyber responsibilities of C-suite executives (“Increased C-Suite Recognition of Insider Threats Through Modern Technological and Strategic Mechanisms”). Their remarks have been edited for length and style.

MCC: There was a day when corporate executives could walk the factory floor to keep an eye out for people and process problems. In today’s knowledge economy, executives have limited visibility into employees’ day-to-day processes and tools. At the same time, government regulators and others are putting insider cybersecurity threats squarely on their radar. That seems like an impossible situation. How should C-suite executives deal with it?

Sherer: Let’s start with the metaphor of the factory floor. What can we do to recreate that kind

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Continue Reading The Cyberthreat Within: As companies wake up to insider threats, C-suite executives are looking beyond IT for help

By: David White, AlixPartners LLP

Regulators around the globe have been stepping up anti-corruption compliance efforts. The past few years have seen a marked uptick in both formal inquiries and legal actions related to money laundering and bribery, with regulators demanding increased access to company records. Given their global scope, the costs of responding can be enormous. For example, the global retailer Walmart predicts that its anti-bribery compliance-related costs for this year alone will be upward of $180 million[1].

This is not atypical for companies with a large global footprint. Earlier this year, Olympus resolved a $22.8 million Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) enforcement action concerning alleged misconduct in Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Argentina, Mexico and Costa Rica. Managers at an Olympus factory in China were also tied to related company investigations[2]. Separately, Olympus Corporation of the Americas agreed to pay $612 million plus interest to resolve parallel criminal and civil investigations into alleged violations of the Anti-Kickback Statute and the False Claims Act[3].

The primary costs are typically pre-enforcement action professional fees and expenses, with the bulk of these expended on information collection and analysis. This information typically comes from a myriad of…
Continue Reading Finding the Needle in the Anti-Corruption Haystack

By: Matt Kivlin, ELM Solutions, A Wolters Kluwer Business

Last year at Legaltech New York I spoke to an in-house attorney about one of her worst days on the job. She was hard at work on litigation related to a compliance breach. The breach had occurred because the compliance staff mistakenly believed that a particular regulation did not apply to their business unit. There had been an internal investigation of the incident, but she was having difficulty verifying the steps the company had taken because the records were in disarray. Some of the investigation files were incorrectly moved into an unrelated archive, while other activities were undocumented altogether.

While trying to navigate the morass, she received a mass email from a colleague instructing everyone, incorrectly, that a certain regulation – yes, the very same one now making my friend’s life so difficult – was not applicable to the company. She feared that another breach could result and that she’d have to go through the process all over again.

Fortunately, the embattled attorney was able to quickly contact the right colleague and have a correction sent out. But she was understandably frustrated by the difficulties she’d encountered, particularly because she

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Continue Reading Tightening Up Links Drives Down Risks: Integrated infrastructure facilitates GRC-Legal compliance cooperation