Managing Legal
The Point
“It’s the front-line people who know what’s going on, not the people with their feet up on the desks in their offices”. So writes Alan Weiss, the clearest thinker on professional services delivery I’ve ever met.
Yet, in the context of critical enterprise risk management, the odds are against one employee’s knowledge of incipient legal or regulatory danger coming to the attention of someone positioned to effectively nip that danger in the bud. Unless that one employee is either relatively senior, or visits with one of the company’s lawyers by happenstance.
This Matters to Your Business
With the early-stage legal and regulatory dangers that mutated into the Boeing 737 Max crashes, the General Motors ignition switch tragedy, and the Blue Bell Creamery listeria outbreaks, it was, as Alan Weiss would have put it, “the front-line people” who knew about those hazards well before any customer died. It was not the corporate law function (see post). Continue reading
