General Counsel: Guardian and Conscience of the Company
Forbes contributor Mark A. Cohen writes about his recent ABA address to a group of general counsel on the spate of high-profile scandals and regulatory imbroglios that resulted in no small part from the failure of GC’s to discharge the guardian/conscience role.
In the article, Cohen writes that “general counsel — and large corporate departments — are law’s petri dish. They are reconfiguring the boundaries and expanding the expectations of what it means to be an effective corporate lawyer.”
Cohen cites what he calls of trinity of powerful macroeconomic forces — “globalization, technology, and the global financial crisis changed the way corporations conduct business and accelerated the metamorphosis of the GC role into what it is today.”
