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| Latest Corporate Counsel News |
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| DuPont Names Thomas Sager New GC | | DuPont announced that vice president and assistant general counsel Thomas L. Sager will become senior vice president and general counsel on July 1. |
| Backdating Probes Lead to Changes | | In the two years since the U.S. government indicted its first corporate executive in the stock options backdating scandal, more than 130 companies have restated financial results -- producing nearly $14 billion in charges -- and dismissed nearly 100 executives. |
| Wet Blankets: GCs Don't Waiver | | Earlier this year, Bookham Inc. began working with a big national firm on a legal matter. Things went swimmingly for a week or two until the firm asked, as part of its engagement letter, for a blanket conflict waiver that would let its lawyers work for other clients on unrelated cases against the small San Jose, Calif., tech company. |
| Indictments Crash Down on Broadcom | | A two-week slice in the life of Broadcom co-founder Henry Nicholas, according to federal prosecutors: In an Orange County, Calif., hotel room on Jan. 17, 2001, Nicholas met with Mehrdad Nayebi. This executive had been fired, yet demanded that his stock options still vest. The previous November, Nayebi's attorney had presented Broadcom senior management with a draft complaint that alleged a range of illegal behavior relating to the backdating of stock options. |
| P&G's One-Two Punch | | After 27 years as an in-house lawyer at The Procter & Gamble Co., Steven Jemison is finally making it to the top. On June 1 he was slated to become chief legal officer of the Cincinnati-based consumer products giant. But Jemison will have to share his moment in the spotlight. |
| Avoid Quick Fixes and Control the True Cost of Litigation | | How does a business enterprise in the United States reduce its litigation costs in an era when the U.S. legal system, and especially the litigation process, involves profound dysfunction and spiraling costs? Surprisingly few business leaders ask that question. |
| Group Offers ACC Members a Program on Summer Dress Codes | | The Association of Corporate Counsel, along with a training service called WeComply, is offering a free two-minute "Summer Dress Code" phone message for ACC members to use for communicating guidelines and policies to their company employees. |
| Beware Corrupt Payments Abroad | | A company with operations abroad looking for some excitement can likely find it by avoiding affirmative management of its risks arising from the potential that corrupt payments are made in its foreign operations. |
| Wipeout: Subprime Crisis Spawns Wave of Litigation | | Everyone knew that the subprime mortgage crisis would lead to a ton of litigation, but few expected it to be this bad. Hundreds of subprime-related suits have been filed already, and by the end of the year the total will almost certainly exceed the number of suits filed during the entire savings and loan crisis. |
| Darden GC Reflects on Youth Spent in Africa, Former Hard Rock Role | | Horace G. Dawson III, division general counsel of Darden Restaurants Inc., was invited to serve on a GC panel in Atlanta recently for the Leadership Institute for Women of Color Attorneys. An African-American man, he sat with two African-American female in-house lawyers and one white male lawyer speaking on the topic, "Finding your niche in the corporate world." |
| The Risk of Using Independent Contractors | | The legal landscape involving independent contractors has dramatically and swiftly changed. For decades, legal challenges to an employer's use of independent contractors were infrequent, and many companies were willing to risk the remote chance that they would have to defend a lawsuit or a regulatory inquiry that they had misclassified certain employees as independent contractors. |
| InBev GC: Six Simple Rules for Winning My Business | | Law firm partners around the world will want to pour a cool one and sip on this: The chief legal officer of the world's largest brewing company in terms of volume has published a no-holds-barred list of how to get and keep her business. |
| Safeway GC Has a Lot on His Plate | | Gordon's raison d'être is to "achieve the company's goals with appropriate legal and compliance risk." No two days at the office are the same. Generally, the most pressing matters are placed on the front burner. Gordon cited litigation, transactions, board issues and "any emergency" as focal points. |
| Dewey Nabs Affymetrix In-House Team | | After some setbacks to its Silicon Valley presence, New York's Dewey & LeBoeuf has snatched a team of in-house lawyers from global biotech company Affymetrix. |
| Clear Channel Deal: A Tumultuous Path and a Thousand E-Mails | | Brian Erb didn't get much sleep the weekend before last.That's because Erb, a San Francisco corporate partner, was part of a Ropes & Gray team representing two private equity firms in their off-again-on-again $18 billion buyout of Clear Channel Communications. |
| Call to Action: Part Two | | Four years ago, Roderick A. Palmore urged GCs to take a stand for diversity, and 110 of them responded by signing a Call to Action, a document that committed them to making progress in their own legal departments and demanding the same of their outside law firms. |
| New DOJ Policy: Just Call it the Christopher Christie Amendment | | You can probably thank U.S. Attorney Christopher Christie of New Jersey for the latest addition to the U.S. Department of Justice's policy manual. The change will end certain deals like the one Christie reached with Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. in which the drug company, among other things, agreed to establish a business ethics chair at Christie's old law school. |
| Xilinx GC Faces Challenges of SOX, Patent Trolls, Globalization | | Scott Hover-Smoot is vice president and general counsel at Xilinx Inc., a San Jose, Calif., company that manufactures programmable microchips and employs about 3,000 people around the world. Prior to becoming GC at Xilinx, Hover-Smoot served as a Silicon Valley-based regional counsel and director at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. He is also a former general counsel at California Micro Devices Corp. |
| Lending Lawyers: Secondments Gaining Popularity | | A few large law firms have been arranging secondments -- short-term contracts under which companies "borrow" an outside lawyer for a few weeks to a year or more -- for years, particularly as a service to overseas clients who are more familiar with the practice. But as corporate law departments continue to face budget pressures, more GCs, along with their outside counsel, are taking a closer look at arranging their own secondments. |
| This Cat Has Claws | | Lawyers for Caterpillar Inc. don't shy away from legal battles. You might say they move the earth -- perhaps it's a byproduct of being the world's largest maker of construction equipment. |
| Best Legal Department: Previous Winners | | General Electric Co. received our Best Legal Department award last year for its singular ability to be both a visionary and an implementer. Its lawyers excelled in a few key areas: a top-notch litigation practice that identifies risk early on, deft management of outside legal counsel, and homegrown technology that's the envy of law departments nationwide. |
| 2008 Best Legal Department: And the Winner Is ... | | Richard Baer clearly remembers the day he walked into the center of a perfect legal storm. Like the eye of every hurricane, the nondescript San Francisco conference room was deceptively calm that fall 2004 day. But the eye soon passed. |
| Turbocharging Tech | | For years Thomas Gottschalk, the former general counsel of General Motors Corp., was a notorious computerphobe. Fellow GM lawyers recall that Gottschalk used his computer as a plant stand, and read his e-mails only after a secretary printed them out. He scribbled replies on the printouts and sent them back. |
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