Last month, Pearson’s high-profile senior vice president and general counsel Bjarne Tellmann was attending an executive leadership course at Harvard Law School when he bumped into Ben Heineman, General Electric Company (GE)’s former veteran legal head who is lauded by many for inventing the playbook for the sophisticated, globe-trotting GC. Tellmann grabbed the opportunity to …
Two books of note have just been published by veteran lawyers – The Inside Counsel Revolution: Resolving the Partner-Guardian Tension by former GE legal head Ben Heineman and The Future of the In-House Lawyer: The General Counsel Revolution, a collection of essays edited by Carillion’s Richard Tapp. The common ground is obvious in charting the …
Continue reading “GCs have arrived and all we have to welcome them are platitudes”
It was third time lucky when IHL finally managed to catch up with The Economist Newspaper’s general counsel and company secretary, Oscar Grut. The GC offered a stream of apologies on IHL’s arrival at his Canary Wharf office, explaining that he had been busy selling off the company’s London headquarters in St James’s. The sale …
It is not easy to be an in-house lawyer. Thank goodness, however, because if it was why on earth would any business want to employ a lawyer? In fact, why would any lawyer go to the trouble of that expensive and gruelling training and working hours that risk burnout; then, just when they reach the …
The report, Mapping the Moral Compass, is the second stage of an initiative to assess the ethical approach of and pressures on the in-house profession. Based on 400 responses, the report documents what was already apparent anecdotally: employed lawyers face considerable and specific ethical pressure points. While those tensions are not obviously more severe than …
When asked what keeps him in-house, Nokia’s Richard Vary touts two key selling points of the job: travel and adrenaline. His role as head of litigation has placed him in some interesting scenarios over his ten years working for the multinational communications and IT company. ‘It was my birthday last year when I arrived at …
I love my career. I haven’t loved it at all times. Over the years it was tough. But over time I became more confident, the anxiety passed and I got into the interesting aspects of what I was doing. I got to enjoy it very much.
I’ve been advocating for some time that the ‘Trusted Adviser’ description of in-house counsel and GCs has the potential to encourage too much detachment between those lawyers and the organisations that employ them. While there must be some level of professional detachment, I encourage proactivity, dubbing this approach the ‘Ethical Champion’ − a style more …
Can Dave Lewis save Tesco? Will Bob Dudley turn BP around? Journalists and financial analysts ask these questions, and headline writers dutifully stick them at the top of the page. But the questions are absurd. We should stop asking them. Consider an international business employing tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people. There …
Continue reading “If it is lonely at the top for your CEO, sort out your reporting lines and help”
Let’s start with an assumption: we will reach peak in-house. Though the in-house profession has hugely expanded over the last 15 years – those in the private sector growing threefold since 2000 to over 16,000 solicitors in England and Wales by 2015 – in-house legal teams cannot keep growing forever. At some point companies will …