Legal Risk in the Corporate World: The Changing Role of in-House Counsel

This book will provide an empirically grounded (qualitative and quantitative), in-depth investigation of how legal risk is defined and managed by in-house lawyers and others, and the ethical dimensions to legal risk management. The growth in legal risk as a phenomenon of importance has been accompanied by the growing significance and status of the role of General Counsel. Numbers of in-house lawyers in England & Wales have more than doubled since 2002. In-house lawyers are regularly exhorted to be commercial, proactive and strategic, to be business leaders and not (mere) lawyers. This study explores their role by calling on 3 key pieces of empirical research: (i) interviews with 34 senior in-house lawyers and senior compliance staff in large corporates; (ii) a large online survey of in-house lawyers; and (iii) additional interviews with further in-house lawyers. On the basis of this evidence, the authors explore how ethical infrastructure is managed and what role there is or should be for the regulation of in-house lawyers.