The Role of General Counsel

• Posted by Geoffrey G. Gussis on September 22nd, 2005


• Filed in News

The Corporate Compliance Prof points to a forthcoming Fordham Law Review article on the role of general counsel at a publicly-held corporation.  The article should be available later this year.  The Corporate Compliance Prof has some of the details from the article’s abstract:

"This essay focuses on the position of general counsel within a publicly-held business corporation when the general counsel is an employee-officer of the corporation charged with overall responsibility for how the corporation’s legal matters are handled. So situated, a general counsel’s roles include furnishing legal advice to the corporation’s board of directors, CEO, and other senior executives. But a contemporary general counsel often occupies other roles as well, each complex and additionally interlinked in many ways. These linkages may be beneficial to a corporation and society more generally. Nonetheless, general counsel’s position has often been characterized as ambiguous, a characterization that suggests that not all occupants of the position succeed in balancing its
multiple roles in either a professionally or socially satisfactory manner."

Link: Corporate Compliance Prof Blog: Article of Interest — Role of General Counsel.