To learn more about social responsibility, advocacy, and ethics, try spending some time with a five-year-old. As lawyers, many of us are required to spend a certain minimum number of hours at ethics classes, which tend to be dreary and doldrum. The author of this article suggests int he future that lawyers spend their time learning ethics from young children. Doing some will not only be informative, but will be anything but dreary.
Discusses the necessary ingredients of effective compliance and ethics training and the key advantages of such ingredients compared to standard lecture formats.
Read this 2009 Communicator Award-winning article! <br/>Discusses how legal doctrines shape the corporate social responsibility (CSR) debate, enables in-house counsel to recognize CSR for what it is and why it is important and suggests ways to deal with it in your role as corporate attorney.
A young lawyer drops a file on your desk: "We got him cold," he says. "Here are his emails to his lawyer—I bet he has admitted the sexual harassment in some emails to his attorney and once we read them, we can nail him good." But should you open and read them? Something makes you uneasy about reading those emails. Are you right to worry? Yes. While there are cases which would support your claim that the executive waived the attorney-client privilege by using company computers, especially in light of your company policy prohibiting using computers for personal use, the law in this area is neither mature nor settled. Proceed, as they say, at your peril.
Discusses one of the most important findings of the 2007 National Business Ethics Survey: that installation of a comprehensive ethics and compliance program alone is not sufficient to substantially improve performance.
A new column for ACC Docket, Outsource Resource, covers and discusses the challenges in-house counsel face with limited budget and staff.
Options backdating is to CLOs as financial restatements were to CFOs. And in both situations, it's not pretty. Those of us who are even semiconscious have noticed that the CLOs are taking the fall in the options cases. Why and how bad is it? Read John Villa's article on this matter.
Receiving a letter from the US government stating that a qui tam action has been filed against your company can be a nightmare for the in-house attorney ordered to stay quiet about the case. With shareholder litigation on the rise, companies subject to the False Claims Acts need to consider all options. In-house counsel need to prepare themselves for a tug of war between the laws, penalties that exist for violating a seal, and those that require the disclosure of information to publicly traded companies.
In-house counsel have amendments to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure to contend with, and the high costs of complying with them tend to come from the legal department's pocketbook. Learn about how to recover from the cost of ediscovery.