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It’s no secret — businesses with highly engaged employees generally have elevated productivity and better financial results. But employee needs and expectations change with the times, and that has never been more apparent than in today’s workplace.

This is the second part of a two-part article on the role of in-house counsel in enterprise risk management (ERM), specifically as to how we function in and around the “three lines of defense” model (3LD) that is providing much of today’s structural ERM framework.

It appears that everyone — law firm leaders and general counsels — view the lack of diversity as a serious problem in the legal field. However, the glacial pace of progress suggests the legal needs to find new and imaginative ways to foster diversity. Enter the Rooney Rule.

Getting a jumpstart on digesting these amendments is important to ensure your company’s litigation management processes, and that cost management procedures match the current state of the FRCP. This article summarizes the key changes from those amendments.

The presidential election campaign in the United States has shone a light on Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) entered into by the United States and other countries.

This article explores the enforceability of non-compete covenants and suggests some drafting guidelines to improve the chances of implementing valid and enforceable non-compete covenants.

In-house lawyers are well positioned to advocate for social responsibilities that will benefit their employers. Read about how ACC Australia joined the vanguard of the social justice movement by supporting a call for constitutional (and other) reforms to empower First Nations people.

This article discusses strategic considerations for FCPA compliance from the perspective of a non-controlling JV partner.

As an in-house counsel, one of your key roles is to negotiate agreements that obligate your organization and counterparties for many years. After these agreements are signed, the true value of the agreement begins to accrue and the real work begins. To be a great in-house lawyer, you need to get out of your office and communicate key information about these agreements to your operations team.

In-house counsel are often the primary contact for negotiating certain types of contracts. However, in this role, you are not in charge of executing all the terms and commitments in each agreement. Agreements typically require many teams and departments to engage in or abstain from certain activities.

As an in-house lawyer based in Silicon Valley, one of the most popular agreements is the nondisclosure agreement (NDA) or confidentiality agreement. The latest trend for corporate offices is to mandate that all visitors, including the pizza delivery person, sign an NDA on a tablet computer before taking a step beyond the lobby.

How can professionals break into the blockchain industry? As someone who has made many career changes, here are the five steps that have guided my various career transitions, including my most recent pivot to blockchain.

Both data privacy and data security issues make headlines regularly; this article will focus on how in-house counsel can help educate and engage the board of directors with regard to data security.

Conducting FCPA due diligence on a target before and after signing a final agreement allows the buyer to fully understand the degree that the asset abides by anticorruption laws.

Lawyers do many things, but one of the most common is writing. In this post, I’ll talk about some of the best practices for turning abstract ideas into a concrete and well-organized vision.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become entwined in business processes across a range of industries. Increasingly, we see corporate leaders and innovation teams proactively exploring how they can harness AI in their workflows to increase efficiencies, attain time savings, and better manage risk.

Are you considering an acquisition of a Canadian business?

With increasing pressure to work more efficiently and to do more for less, legal analytics can be a useful tool for litigation management.

ESG is becoming more important to regulators, consumers, and shareholders, so it must also become more important to businesses and their in-house counsel.

Given the strategic importance of diversity to sustainable corporate success, corporate directors may want to know how to help their companies make meaningful progress with respect to their external legal resources. We offer our perspective and a few practical suggestions.

It’s a common myth that litigation is only good for fee-based litigators. But those resourceful in-house counsel who care to create better processes and awareness can hunt, find and mine written materials created by others’ prior lawsuits to accelerate achieving their, and their clients’, objectives.

Knowing that your witness can make or break a case and, depending on the type of case, cost your company millions of dollars, you need to ensure that you have a pool of knowledgable and competent witnesses at your fingertips. You need to do what you can to avoid that bad deposition that will haunt your company for years to come and bind the company to that testimony.

To illustrate how the use of settlement counsel functions and adds value, the following is a case narrative, based on our experiences with several clients. In this first installment, we will explore the general counsel’s perspective of settlement counsel and the benefits of adding another arrow to your quiver.

This article recommends some approaches and tools including the best way to gain the confidence of business colleagues. It also provides methods for getting the most out of a legal department and working with business counterparts effectively.

This article covers several major considerations for when you respond to data requests and how to ensure that data privacy violations do not occur.

We discuss below the changes to the Canadian Trademarks Act that will have the most significant effect on trademark owners and their branding strategy.

A recent Court of Appeal for Ontario decision considers if the courts’ traditional limitation on sitting outside their province of jurisdiction should yield to the practicalities of an increasingly interconnected world.

With a Supplemental Unemployment Benefits Plan (SUB Plan), in-house counsel can help create a clearer path to recovery.

The pool of talent exists. In order to attract a diverse group of talent a wide net needs to be cast. Your fiscal health could depend on it — research shows that diverse corporations perform better — as well as your success in litigation. At this point, chief legal officers/general counsel, as corporate leaders, must look internally at our own initiatives before we expect sustainable results from outside counsel.

Knowing where the risks exist and crafting practical processes to both comply with US obligations and meet international privacy standards are some of the largest challenges facing the multinational corporation today. As with almost any legal risk, it is important to be prepared.