In-House Counsel

Conflicting data on how often compliance reports to the general counsel

By Rees Morrison

A General Counsel Roundtable survey in 2007 collected from one hundred law departments the ?non-legal? functions that fall to the general counsel. Compliance ranked third after Corporate Secretary and Corporate Governance (See my post of Jan. 18, 2008: ?Corporate Governance?.). Fine, but the percentage of respondents who said that Compliance is within the set of responsibilities of the chief legal officer was a surprisingly high 70.6 percent.

Posts on this blog have described other surveys? results on the frequency of compliance reporting to the legal functions, and they haven?t come up with such a high percentage (See my post of Nov. 1, 2005: one-third to general counsel; June 11, 2008: 20% of ?top compliance executive? report to the general counsel; and Oct. 21, 2005: where should compliance report if not to law.).

Other posts comment on compliance-law reporting (See my post of May 20, 2005: compliance and law together; July 31, 2005: compliance and law within same group; and Dec. 22, 2005: law department relationship to ethics and compliance heads.).

Still a third set of posts look at reporting lines of the compliance function in specific industries (See my post of Jan. 16, 2006: health care companies; and Feb. 7, 2006: financial institutions.) while others cite specific companies (See my post of Sept. 17, 2005 #2: at Citigroup, compliance reports to chief risk officer; Nov. 16, 2005 #1: at Raytheon, Chief Ethics Officer and Chief Compliance Officer report to GC; and Jan. 17, 2006 #1: at McDonald?s, compliance reports to GC.).

Full post as published by Law Department Management on January 20, 2009 (boomark / email).