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The Critical Crossroads Of Corporate America

By Peter J. Kalis
September 22, 2003

The general counsel function is the critical crossroads of corporate America. Even the most skeptical of senior managers and board members evince a growing awareness that the role of the general counsel is crucial and strategic, and not merely technical and subordinate. The question, however, is whether this crossroads can bear the increasing volume and weight of the traffic coming its way.

We recently retained independent social scientists to survey legal decisionmakers in major corporations and published the results under the title Top of Mind: A Survey of Senior In-House Counsel. The survey sample of 106 in-house lawyers was statistically significant, and the results were always interesting and at times surprising.

Some key findings:

  • Three-quarters of primary legal decisionmakers say that their workloads increased over the past two years
  • A plurality of respondents believe that corporate governance will be their hottest issue in 2003
  • Half of the in-house lawyers are unimpressed with their law firms' use of technology
  • Corporate counsel want their law firms to bring clients together for best practices reviews
  • In-house counsel mention cost containment more than any other issue in the survey
  • Not one respondent saw a decrease in law firm bills in the last two years and a majority says that those bills have increased
  • The overwhelming majority of respondents believes that their outside firms are adding value to the corporation

The last few items listed above present an apparent contradiction. While corporate counsel lamented the increasing amounts spent on outside counsel, the overwhelming majority also weighed in that outside counsel deliver good, or even excellent, value to the client. Cost and value, of course, are different concepts. Nevertheless, it is at least a curiosity that these findings point in such starkly opposite directions.

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