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 …
‘There’s a serious danger of a regulator trying to regulate something that it doesn’t understand,’ says Kingfisher group general counsel and company secretary Clare Wardle. Her comment comes as the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) works on another overhaul of its handbook, halfway through a two-year review that will end in 2017, a process that has …
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 …
I want to give you an overview of my theory about the inside counsel revolution. It is clear it has happened in the US. It is happening to a degree in Europe and in Asia. General counsel have become much more sophisticated, capable and influential, transforming law and business in two ways. Inside the company, …
It is the business issue that has dominated headlines for months and represents for UK plc a potentially far more profound impact than any general election or change of government. The vote on 23 June on the UK’s membership of the EU promises ominous levels of uncertainty for business and unprecedented challenges for general counsel …
IHL: What initiatives has Microsoft and its legal department pioneered to promote ethnic diversity? Mary Snapp: Microsoft’s legal department has had a focused diversity team for 12 years. Brad Smith [Microsoft’s president and chief legal officer] and I collaborated to start the diversity team within the department, which grew to include 85 people. Our original …
‘I believe very strongly in leading by example,’ says Nokia global head of litigation Richard Vary. Although his legal team has a formal mentoring system in place, Vary maintains that it is the informal connections inherent in mentoring that play the most important role in developing in-house counsel. ‘You bring the people along, they see …
Taken in isolation – and at £35bn, one of the largest oil and gas deals on record stands pretty well on its own – the acquisition of BG Group by Shell could be seen as a bellwether for a confident oil and gas market. But headline deals aside, the freefall in oil prices has had …
On 17 April, the government published a second consultation document on a new criminal offence that will apply to companies that fail to prevent the facilitation of tax evasion by those associated with it. The new offence is one of a number of new initiatives designed to tackle offshore tax evasion and corruption.
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 …
The UK Continental Shelf (UKCS) is a mature oil and gas basin. The collapse in global oil prices from a high of $115 per barrel in June 2014 to a price below $30 a barrel earlier this year has had a severe impact on the basin. Although according to Oil & Gas UK (OGUK) UKCS …
Continue reading “The oil price collapse – UK regulators to the rescue?”
Almost half of the FTSE 350 businesses surveyed regard cyber attacks as the biggest threat to their business when compared with other key risks. This statistic, taken from the government’s latest FTSE 350 Cyber Governance Health Check report published this May, suggests that the message that cyber and data issues are a business, rather than …