The Point Corporate Legal should be aligned with the company’s strategy, and its success or failure in supporting that strategy should be judged by two outcomes: Legal’s financial sustainability: By disciplined, continuous cuts in unproductive costs, free up dollars for reallocation to spiraling new demands. Prevention of legal problems: Guided…
Who Should Do What on Legal and Regulatory Risk? The enterprise needs compliance systems and processes that provide early warning of legal and regulatory dangers, that trigger timely actions against those dangers, and that, ultimately, can prevent them from mutating into something worse. Those systems and processes should report up to…
Who Should Do What on Legal and Regulatory Risk? The enterprise needs compliance systems and processes that provide early warning of legal and regulatory dangers, that trigger timely actions against those dangers, and that, ultimately, can prevent them from mutating into something worse. Those systems and processes should report up…
As Part II of this four-part series illustrates, most C-suites and boards exempt the corporate law function from accountability for anticipating, preparing contingency efforts against, and decisively neutralizing — legal and regulatory dangers that have not yet mutated into full-blown lawsuits, agency enforcement actions, or some other catastrophe. In each…
Part I of this four-part series concluded: “So there is a gaping legal and regulatory hole in what should be a comprehensive shield of company-wide, managed compliance.” Without experienced business leadership taking charge and managing compliance across the enterprise, and overseeing the systems and processes this requires, Legal is not…
Corporate law functions engage with critical enterprise risk in the same spontaneous, one-off manner that most individual lawyers do their work: ad hoc, case-by-case reaction to what someone else has already put in front of them. And that typically after an incipient problem has become a full-blown lawsuit, agency enforcement…
In Part I of this two-part series I introduced Crew Resource Management — CRM — the basic aviation safety protocol as an effective tool to stop corporate misconduct at its source. Several years ago I represented a pilot in an NTSB investigation. Working with three airline captains to prepare the…
Citing Wells Fargo & Co.’s “recent and widespread consumer abuses and other compliance breakdowns”, the Federal Reserve announced late last Friday that it, “would restrict the growth of the firm until it sufficiently improves its governance and controls”. The Wall Street Journal called the Fed’s action “unprecedented”. Ian Katz of…