Too busy to read it all? Try these books, blogs, webcasts, websites and other info resources curated by CCBJ especially for corporate counsel and legal ops professionals.
AMICUS BRIEF: Association of Corporate Counsel / Sidley Austin
The SEC opened a can of worms when it took aim at DC’s Covington & Burling to enforce an administrative subpoena seeking the names of clients who were victims of a data breach. Covington rebuffed the feds. We’re not going to in violate professional conduct rules by disclosing client secrets, the firm responded, prompting the ACC to jump into the fracas with a brief, prepared with the help of Sidley, arguing that the SEC’s position would have wide-ranging negative ramifications for in-house counsel. “Corporations rely on the trust and confidence of the attorney-client relationship with their own lawyers and their outside lawyers,” says the brief. “In that way, in-house counsel functions in essence as both lawyer and client—often at the same time. That makes them doubly exposed to the Commission’s proposed degradation of attorney-client confidences and secrets.”
ARTICLE: BLOOMBERG LAW
It started with a breakthrough in removing skin blemishes several years ago. Chris Marlett, CEO of investment bank MDB Capital Holdings, seized the opportunity he saw to invest in nano-pulse technology that could make the treatment commercially available. He and others established a new company called Pulse Biosciences, which he eventually took public, and they were (kind of) off to the races. The process, particularly navigating patent protection, was a nightmare. And with that Marlett tried to turn lemons into lemonade by starting one of Arizona’s newest law firms: MDB Capital-owned PatentVest, an end-to-end firm to help startups hone their tech, capture it in strong patents, and, possibly, go public. Such an all-in-one legal and business service profiting nonlawyers is banned by ethics rules in virtually every other state, but Marlett is undaunted thanks to Arizona’s ongoing experiment in who can practice law. “Now,” he says, “we’ll have one unified process to do it.”
OPINION: MLA Global
Historically, in-house corporate legal teams have been viewed as the “department of no” – “a cost center and bureaucratic roadblock that stifles creativity and jams up the sales and marketing pipeline,” writes Allison Rosner, a director on the in-house counsel recruiting team of Major, Lindsey & Africa. However, she says, the pandemic gave rise to an opportunity to turn the tide. In order to make this happen, the business and legal departments need to be nimble and adapt together as aligned partners to facilitate success for the organization as a whole. Accomplishing this, however, requires a seismic shift in how most legal departments are perceived by other stakeholders across the organization. How do you accomplish this? In this piece, Rosner lays out 8 helpful steps to set the wheels of transformation in motion.
Published April 21, 2023.
