LEGAL
The Insider: Ten habits of highly effective in-house lawyers
Not too long ago, I came across an old, dog-eared copy of Stephen Covey's 1989 business self-help masterpiece, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. As I flipped through the pages of the book I realized that most, if not all, of it is still relevant almost 30 years later. And it got me thinking about some of the things I learned as I advanced in my career as an in-house lawyer. Through luck, hard work, trial and error, excellent mentors, and other things, I stumbled upon a number of “habits” that I think make for highly effective and successful in-house lawyers.
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Pushing process and performance: How general counsel identify and overcome challenges to effectively move forward
Since 2012, dozens of workshops have focused on increasing legal output and quality while simultaneously reducing costs by using the Smarter Legal Model. These workshops consist of senior in-house practitioners from the U.S. to China and involve all industries and department sizes. Each workshop starts with the same open-ended question: What's on your mind? This discussion identifies the agenda for the problem-solving process to follow (with perhaps some group therapy involved). Despite often feeling isolated and specialized, general counsel express very similar challenges around the world.
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Corporate counsel should drive innovation
Take an active role in how your outside law firms are approaching innovation. The pace of change has been too slow. It is in your interest to help speed it up. The needs of the corporate clients constitute the most fundamental driver of change in the legal profession. Almost all analysis of why a paradigm shift is underway begins with clients' need to “do more with less.”
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Urgent: Travel restrictions following recent executive order
On January 27, 2017, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States” (the “Executive Order”). Among other provisions, the Executive Order institutes a 90-day ban on entry into the United States by foreign nationals from the following seven countries: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen (the “7 Countries”). The ban exempts foreign nationals traveling on diplomatic visas, North Atlantic Treaty Organization visas, C-2 visas for travel to the United Nations, and G-1, G-2, G-3, and G-4 visas.
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Corporate Counsel Leadership Forum: How GCs are dealing with crisis in the age of social media and viral videos
One of the most vital and potentially most damaging (if handled poorly) duties of the general counsel's office is managing any crisis that arises, especially when the flames of such situations can be fanned by social media and the spread of news and rumor over the Internet. Indeed, today's environment of ubiquitous social media use, 24-hour news cycles, and damaging viral videos has greatly ratcheted up the pressure on companies to respond immediately to every crisis before it spins out of control.
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Whistleblowing practices and severance agreements — what works
Through their enforcement actions, policy initiatives, and press releases, United States regulators are showing what effective whistleblowing practices look like, and why their importance is growing. Although many firms probably already have a whistleblowing policy in place, maybe even a confidential whistleblowing hotline, such steps may not be enough to satisfy critical regulatory imperatives.
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Earnings-stripping regulations finalized • U.S. Customs and Border Protection enforcement • State-level privacy and data security actions
Learn about the IRS's new final and temporary earnings-stripping regulations, plus the new, stricter enforcement measures from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection under the Trade Facilitation and Trade Enforcement Act. Finally, read about the increasing state-level actions across industry sectors emphasizing that companies must ensure they comply with a growing patchwork of federal and state privacy and data security requirements.
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6 tips for delegating legal work
There is no class on delegation in law school. The closest thing is a lecture on the nondelegation doctrine, which teaches that Congress cannot delegate certain duties to administrative agencies. So what is an attorney to do when it comes to knowing how to delegate legal tasks? Because developing delegation skills is not part of legal education, corporate counsel need to learn from other disciplines and mentors in the workplace.
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