When asked what keeps him in-house, Nokia’s Richard Vary touts two key selling points of the job: travel and adrenaline. His role as head of litigation has placed him in some interesting scenarios over his ten years working for the multinational communications and IT company. ‘It was my birthday last year when I arrived at …
It was third time lucky when IHL finally managed to catch up with The Economist Newspaper’s general counsel and company secretary, Oscar Grut. The GC offered a stream of apologies on IHL’s arrival at his Canary Wharf office, explaining that he had been busy selling off the company’s London headquarters in St James’s. The sale …
I love my career. I haven’t loved it at all times. Over the years it was tough. But over time I became more confident, the anxiety passed and I got into the interesting aspects of what I was doing. I got to enjoy it very much.
Can Dave Lewis save Tesco? Will Bob Dudley turn BP around? Journalists and financial analysts ask these questions, and headline writers dutifully stick them at the top of the page. But the questions are absurd. We should stop asking them. Consider an international business employing tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people. There …
Continue reading “If it is lonely at the top for your CEO, sort out your reporting lines and help”
It is not easy to be an in-house lawyer. Thank goodness, however, because if it was why on earth would any business want to employ a lawyer? In fact, why would any lawyer go to the trouble of that expensive and gruelling training and working hours that risk burnout; then, just when they reach the …
Let’s start with an assumption: we will reach peak in-house. Though the in-house profession has hugely expanded over the last 15 years – those in the private sector growing threefold since 2000 to over 16,000 solicitors in England and Wales by 2015 – in-house legal teams cannot keep growing forever. At some point companies will …
The report, Mapping the Moral Compass, is the second stage of an initiative to assess the ethical approach of and pressures on the in-house profession. Based on 400 responses, the report documents what was already apparent anecdotally: employed lawyers face considerable and specific ethical pressure points. While those tensions are not obviously more severe than …
Almost half of the FTSE 350 businesses surveyed regard cyber attacks as the biggest threat to their business when compared with other key risks. This statistic, taken from the government’s latest FTSE 350 Cyber Governance Health Check report published this May, suggests that the message that cyber and data issues are a business, rather than …
As the campaigning continues for the forthcoming Referendum on whether the UK should leave the European Union (EU), immigration (and its links with national security) is one of the central topics in the debates. Aside from the headline grabbing national security concerns (‘Brexit could trigger World War Three warns David Cameron’ in the Mirror on …
Does your business produce waste? The answer is very likely to be ‘yes’. Waste can be any number of things; including any material or item which you have no further use for and want to remove. If you are discarding it, it’s still waste, even if you can repair or reuse it. It includes kitchen …