The Wired GC is leaving this:
For this:
Seems like something the Reasonable Man would do. Time to work on a tan to get ready for total shroud removal.
Back next week…
Archives for February 2007
Managing Partner Honesty
Once in a while the unvarnished truth shines through.
Gina Passarella of The Legal Intelligencer does great reporting in a story about law firm salary increases.
Usually law firms tiptoe around the question of whether ever-escalating rates and starting salaries find their way into the clients’ pocket. But not this time, courtesy of Schnader Harrison Segal & Lewis Chairman Ralph G. Wellington:
“Clients ultimately bear the burden of all of this.”
Bingo!
To add to the substance of the story, Ms. Passarella gets this out of President Patrick J. O’Connor, President of Cozen O’Connor:
“We think at some point there comes a limit of what firms can pay associates because of the competition for clients.”
Ah-ha!
Competition for clients. That’s a useful area of focus for managing partners, to counterbalance the usual remarks of the “war for talent” zealots.
Two cheers for two firm leaders who are at least in the right ballpark from the client’s perspective.
New GC for HP
Hewlett Packard announced that Morgan Lewis partner Michael Holston has been appointed as general counsel. HP CEO Mark Hurd highlighted key attributes of Mr. Holston:
“Mike is a first-rate lawyer, with extensive trial and government-relations experience, as well as a deep knowledge of HP and its culture,†said Hurd. “I am delighted that he has accepted this position.â€
The AP story is here.
Mr. Hurd relied on Mr. Holston heavily during the director leak investigations last year. Mr. Holston (and his firm) took a front line position in the matter, and was seen as helping stabilize a very volatile situation.
Mr. Holston joined Morgan Lewis in 2005 from Drinker Biddle.
The HP GC position is one of the premiere openings in the last few years. While HP faces legal challenges on many fronts, these matters can also provide opportunity to move the company (and the legal department) forward.
Look for Fraud, Blame the Lawyers
We’ve heard of “shoot the messenger.” There’s a new variant in the Government Accountability Office’s ongoing investigation of the Department of Homeland Security.
According to the Associated Press, the GAO feels that DHS lawyers are frustrating efforts to root out alleged waste, fraud and mismanagement:
“They’re not very responsive. They don’t give information quickly,” said David Walker, head of the GAO.
“Every document we seek to review has to be reviewed (first) by the general counsel’s office,” Walker added. He said the department’s general counsel wants to “sit in on every interview,” which he deemed inappropriate.
Walker said when there are more lawyers than other staff involved, “you’ve got problems.”
“I agree wholeheartedly,” said Inspector General Richard Skinner. “It’s not a denial of information, but it’s very cumbersome to obtain information.”
Skinner also said that having a supervisor or attorney present when his office interviews an employee “sets a chilling effect” and tells the employee he’s presumed not to be a team player.
Is the GAO really that naive?
Without knowing anything about the specifics of this investigation or the pace of DHS’s response, the notion that an in-house legal department should permit government interviews of employees without counsel present is mind-boggling. Or that there is something wrong with legal review of documents before they are produced.
Anyone who has dealt with regulatory document requests knows that they sometimes require a semi-trailer truck with Bates-stamped contents to be fully responsive.
I imagine DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff (himself a former prosecutor, Judge and Assistant Attorney General) doesn’t want to appear before Congress down the road and have new Majority counsel serve up documents he hasn’t seen and witness transcripts he hasn’t been briefed on. Having been on the other side of that table, Secretary Chertoff definitely knows who is having more fun.
One small note: until last month, the DHS GC was Phil Perry, son-in-law of Vice President Dick Cheney.
I’m sure he enjoyed riding shotgun on this investigation.
You Can Take it With You
Departing employees are apparently taking more than fond memories with them when they leave.
According to UK’s SecurityPark.net, McAfee research in Europe revealed that over 50% of employees surveyed said they would take company data with them when they walk out the door.
Even more troubling is the proliferation of portable memory devices (such as thumb drives) in the workplace, which makes it easy to remove large amounts of data and are easily concealed. What is interesting is that the most common method of removing documents is very old-school:
Company email remains the most common means of sending information externally with 86% admitting to forwarding documents regularly by email. However, many employees are also using methods which corporate IT departments have little or no control over. A quarter (26%) of those that have sent customer information outside of the business admit to using web-based email services such as Yahoo or Hotmail to do so while a significant proportion (83%) are printing customer records out to remove from the business.
Few companies have policies governing bringing portable memory devices into the workplace; fewer still have policies about the use of web-based mail services. In fact, some companies may unwittingly encourage the use of such services by warning employees against using company email for personal matters.
And it’s likely that company data is the least of compliance worries. The widely reported breaches of employee and retiree data can pose civil penalties and reputational risk.
There is a feeling out there that for every publicized data breach there are many others that are never reported. Or worse, detected.
Locking down company data will be an increasing headache for corporate IT departments. And corporate legal departments better be looking over their shoulders from time to time.