GUERILLA WARFARE: No, not the emerging world, just the legal department!

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Guerilla warfare! That was how one key in-house lawyer at the recent Association of Corporate Counsel Europe described the stance that leaders of corporate law departments must take when it comes to imposing themselves as risk leaders within the companies for which they work.

The ‘General’ in question was none other than Tony Wales, former AOL counsel and now chief counsel and company secretary of the influential British Standards Institute group. His acclamation summed up perfectly the mood of, literally, scores of GCs attending the annual gathering of ACC Europe in Vienna early June.

Risk assessment in these tricky economic times was the theme of the two day event and through more than a dozen presentations over the two days, it became clear that the corporate legal leaders were not always the obvious choice for boards of directors to turn to arbitrate on when the dangers of attacks from competition authorities and regulators surfaced.

Compliance departments and other executives were often deciding at the behest of law departments what the points of defence would be. But Mr. Wales, a former chairman of ACC Europe, had very different ideas. The corporate counsel, he urged, – as soon as he or she joins the company – should wage guerrilla warfare and lay down the law from CEO downwards. There was only one person who could correctly assess the risk and action points – and that was the general counsel.

Brave words indeed. And non-lawyers in the company should take heed that it is dangerous to dabble in an increasingly legalistic and regulatory environment unless the fine points are truly understood. Many have done so at their peril.

Instead, Mr Wales urged that companies give the general counsel the power to infiltrate all the departments in a business, encourage reporting to the legal department on a regular basis and help formulate the risk management strategy for the corporation. Full co-operation, he said, would enable tailored programmes ‘in case of’ to be embedded in the culture of the workforce and could prevent disastrous interventions by governments or regulators that can have the effect of destroying companies.

There have been many illustrations of massive damage to companies in recent years that could all have been prevented had line managers and senior executives been aware of the risk and had programmes, written by the legal department, in place.

Contributor:   Patrick Wilkins

Patrick Wilkins was the founder, editor and publisher of the award winning the European Lawyer magazine from its launch in 2000 until 2009 when the publication passed into new hands. A former British national newspaper journalist, he began to specialise in the reporting of law and legal issues in 1994, becoming in 1999 executive editor of Commercial Lawyer. The European Lawyer won the prestigious Queen’s Award for Export in Great Britain in 2006. Contact Patrick for more information on European GC Newsletter. Opinions expressed belong solely to the author, and do not necessarily represent the views of Legal IQ and IQPC.

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