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: 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: 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

Unless You Ask bills itself as a “guide for law departments to get more from external relationships.” As such, it is an important addition to the lengthening shelf of self-help resources for in-house counsel (many offered up by consultants themselves eager to help). It is also an odd duck of a document – by turns a menu, checklist, conversation starter, jeremiad, marriage counselor, screed, shrink and opera buffa – all rolled into one.

The 84-page guide is the handiwork of primary author D. Casey Flaherty, former in-house counsel with Kia Motors America and associate with Holland & Knight, best known, at least to me, for his contributions to the popular “3 Geeks and a Law Blog.” He now consults with in-house departments and law firms on sourcing, process and tech, with an emphasis, as he puts it, on “fostering a structured dialogue between the two” (thus the marriage counseling element).

It is noteworthy that UYA is backed by the External Resources Interest Group of the Association of Corporate Counsel’s 18-month-old Legal Operations organization. That pumps serious credibility into the effort. Among the ops bigwigs contributing to the project are: Diana Barlow, AVP of…
Continue Reading Backstory: Ask and Ye Shall … Get More!

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: Carolyn Casey

As the role of the chief compliance officer (CCO) takes on more prominence, many CEOs and boards must evaluate whether their general counsel (GC) can take on this second role or if the function should be led by a separate executive. After the financial crisis, Enron, and growing privacy, corruption, and whistleblower actions, the glare of the regulatory spotlight seems as certain as sunrise. According to Deloitte, “One of the most important regulatory and policy developments in recent years has been the government’s heightened scrutiny of the effectiveness of an organization’s compliance program in making decisions regarding both liability and cooperation.” It doesn’t take a fortune-teller to predict that corporations will increasingly grapple with the dual-role question.

Are GCs One for Two?

Let’s start by considering the traditional role of lawyers. Lawyers give legal advice and advocate to gain the best outcomes for their clients. When a government subpoena or legal claim arrives on their desk, they gear up to do whatever is necessary to avoid costly judgments or fines, reputation hits and even jail time for their C-suite colleagues. They are protectors and risk managers.

Of course, lawyers also interpret regulatory requirements and things like

…
Continue Reading One for Two or Two for Two with CCOs?: The Chief Compliance Officer Debate

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

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

By: Brian Kim, iDiscovery Solutions and Therese Craparo, Reed Smith LLP

Most experts agree that a sound information governance and data remediation program is vital to driving an organization’s business and reducing its risk profile. But how and why and when and with whom are all questions under active consideration. In this interview, Therese Craparo of Reed Smith and Brian Kim of iDiscovery Solutions give us their perspectives on the rapid evolution of information governance and how it is transforming the way in which organizations think about and manage data. Their remarks have been edited for length and style.

MCC: What is information governance and data remediation? Who should be involved in an organization’s information governance policy?

Craparo: I view information governance as the management of corporate information to facilitate business operations, manage risk, and ensure compliance with legal and regulatory obligations. It is essentially a corporate governance function for managing the most critical and valuable asset of a company – their data and information. Data remediation is part of the information governance process. To have good information governance, you need to make sure that you don’t keep data that you don’t need. Data remediation is the sensible disposal

…
Continue Reading After the Data Deluge: “Keep it all, keep it forever” won’t do any longer. As paradigms shift, information governance, including defensible data remediation, takes center stage