The inside counsel revolution
Subtitle: resolving the partner-guardian tension
By: Ben W. Heineman, Jr
Publisher: American Bar Association
Published: 2016
Place of publication: Chicago, Illinois
Language: eng
Number of pages: 515
ISBN-13: 9781634252799; 9781634252805
Subjects: Corporate lawyers
Description: "In the past 25 years, there has been a revolution in the legal profession. General Counsel and other inside lawyers have risen in quality, responsibility, power and status. Once second-class citizens in corporations and the legal profession, they have become core members of top corporate management, equaling in importance the Chief Financial Officer and the finance function. They have dramatically shifted power from law firms to corporate law departments, assuming strategic direction over legal matters and exercising for greater control over law firm billing and economics. Ben W. Heineman Jr. has led that revolution in his nearly 20 years as the top lawyer at General Electric and then in teaching and writing as a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Harvard Law School's Programs on the Legal Profession and Corporate Governance and as a lecturer at Yale Law School. In this analytic and prescriptive book, he describes the essence of that transformation and the modern role of inside counsel in helping attain the corporate mission of high performance with high integrity: the key functions, relationships, issues, problems and dilemmas. He argues for the role of inside counsel as lawyer-statesman and as a partner of the CEO but also guardian of the corporation, motivated not just by the desire for income but by broader values of integrity and corporate citizenship. The Inside Counsel Revolution is a succinct, concrete yet visionary statement of first principles from a highly regarded founder of the in-house revolution that fundamentally changed the legal profession and reframed the lawyer-statesman role in this era to serve the performance, integrity and risk goals of global capitalism"--Unedited summary from book jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 457-489) and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction : the inside counsel revolution; title: The lawyer-statesman ideal; title: Partner-guardian realities; title: The cultural imperative; title: Compliance and legal hazard : the essence; title: Ethics : the complexity; title: Risk and crisis management; title: Governance : the board relationship; title: Citizenship and the primacy of public policy; title: Leading the law department; title: Law firms-and alternatives; title: The future : problems and possibilities.