Investigating the changing role of in house lawyers.

In the past few weeks, I have been traveling, hosting some friends and working on various projects which have been keeping me very busy. I have actually wanted to blog a few times, but frankly had very little "free" time to do so.

One of the projects that I have been working on is in preparing a lecture and dialogue for a presentation at a law conference this winter.

In December I will be attending the 10th Annual European Bahai Law Conference in the Netherlands and will be offering my 2 cents as an in house attorney on my experiences of guiding business and counseling corporate actors to act more ethically creating a more sound business and legal environment. This has become particularly relevant lately due to all the developments in regulatory compliance mandates (SOX, etc. and other acronyms that make most corporate executives cringe and spends lots more $$ to manage) which have required companies to be more transparent to the stockholder and to avoid deceptive practices.

As a result of these changes, instead of just providing legal advice to address legal issues from a silo that has little interaction with the business, the in-house legal role is shifting to be more of a business counselor, an advocate to help alter and form the strategy of the company and act as true trusted advisor. Either this is just the limited experience of an enthusastic lawyer that has great business folks to work with, or this is fact a changing trend.

In preparation for this I am going to do some research of how other "in house" lawyers have faced this challenge and whether this is true for many in the corporate landscape. If I find enough worthy information, I'd like to write an article of my findings.

For inspiration, I checked out various places that would accept such an article, not an official legal analysis but rather an essay or comment on the relevant legal envirnoment we face today. Suprisingly, I found that the "Harvard Law Review" accepted articles 25 pages or less that would be considered an "Essay" that advances an idea, summarizes a development, or initiates or engages in discussion. I assume that I would need some magic wizardry to get published in something so accomplished and worthy but they do select through anonymous submissions... Who knows?

Anyway, I will need to prepare an outline, chat with some other industry gurus and find out more information and facts. Looking forward to this new journey...