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Risk and The Chief Legal Officer: Expanding Exposure

By Harvard Law School Program on Corporate Governance

My firm has prepared a memo entitled “Risk and The Chief Legal Officer: Expanding Exposure,” which addresses what we believe is expanding exposure facing Chief Legal Offices (CLOs) of US public companies. The first two sections briefly address the two key underpinnings of this phenomenon: (1) increasing focus on the CLO as a central player in the fight for improved corporate governance and legal/ ethical compliance; and (2) an increasingly complex legal environment, with the prospect of more legislation and regulation.

The third section provides the distilled practical guidance of a large number of Skadden lawyers from a broad range of relevant practice areas, developed in response to a basic question: “Based on your personal experience, what do you think would be particularly valuable for a CLO of a public company to know about the CLO’s risk exposure today and how best to manage it?” Our guidance comes in the form of a series of intentionally pithy headline observations, followed by some important elaboration on each. Broadly speaking, our guidance relates to the two basic areas of CLO risk management — responding to a potential or actual problem which arrives on the scene and dealing in advance with preventative measures. Some points clearly fall into one category or the other; a few are relevant to both.

While targeted for CLOs of U.S.public companies, the memo may be of interest to CLOs of many non-U.S. public companies, as well.

The memorandum is available here.

Full post as published by The Harvard Law School Corporate Governance Blog on February 10, 2009 (boomark / email).