In-House Counsel

Six major universities, full of brains, but without a general counsel

By Rees Morrison

In Corp. Counsel, Vol. 15, May 2008 at 98-99, you can peruse a list of 90 ?top-ranked universities and the lawyers that head their legal departments.? In that illustrious grove of academe, however, lurk no less than six that lack a chief legal officer. The bereft six are the Univ. of Delaware, Purdue, Clark, Stevens Institute of Technology, Clarkson, and Penn State. Perhaps they have in-house lawyers but no one designated as even primus inter pares. In fact, I strongly suspect that a few of those half-dozen (5.2% of the group) have a practicing lawyer or two on the payroll.

As a consultant to legal departments as well as an alumnus, I am pleased that my undergraduate college, Harvard, as well as my law school, Columbia, and my LLM school, NYU, each have a general counsel.

One postscript (pun recognized): Georgia Inst. of Technology is headed by a Chief Legal Adviser, which puts that office holder in his place. Just advise me, don?t make any decisions.

Full post as published by Law Department Management on May 08, 2008 (boomark / email).