The
Inside Revolution: Resolving the Partner-Guardian Tension, provides a
thoughtful and thought provoking analysis of the role General Counsels, and
lawyers more generally, can and should play in business and society.
In the past 25 years, there has been a revolution in
the legal profession. General Counsel and other inside lawyers have risen in
quality, responsibility, power and status. Once second-class citizens in
corporations and the legal profession, they have become core members of top
corporate management, equaling in importance the Chief Financial Officer and
the finance function. They have dramatically shifted power from law firms to
corporate law departments, assuming strategic direction over legal matters and
exercising far greater control over law firm billing and economics.
Ben W. Heineman, Jr. has led that revolution in his
nearly 20 years as the top lawyer at GE and then in teaching and writing as a
Distinguished Senior Fellow at Harvard Law School’s Program on the Legal
Profession and lecturer at Yale Law School. In this analytic and prescriptive
book, he describes the essence of that transformation and the modern role of
inside counsel: the key functions, relationships, issues, problems and
dilemmas. Moreover, he argues for the role of inside counsel as
lawyer-statesman, motivated not just by the desire for income but by broader
values of integrity and corporate citizenship.
In this analytic and prescriptive book, he describes
the essence of that transformation and the modern role of inside counsel in
helping attain the corporate mission of high performance with high integrity:
the key functions, relationships, issues, problems and dilemmas. He argues for
the role of inside counsel as lawyer-statesman and as a partner of the CEO but
also guardian of the corporation, motivated not just by the desire for income
but by broader values of integrity and corporate citizenship.
The Inside Counsel Revolution is a
succinct, concrete yet visionary statement of first principles from a highly
regarded founder of the in-house revolution that fundamentally changed the
legal profession and reframed the lawyer-statesman role in this era to serve
the performance, integrity and risk goals of global capitalism.
Published by the American Bar Association in April 2016.
In the past 25 years, there has been a revolution in the legal profession. General Counsel and other inside lawyers have risen in quality, responsibility, power and status. Once second class citizens in corporations and the legal profession, they have become core members of top corporate management, equaling in importance the Chief Financial Officer and the finance function. Benjamin W. Heineman, Jr. has led that revolution in his nearly 20 years as the top lawyer at GE. In this analytic and prescriptive book, he describes the essence of that transformation and the modern role of inside counsel: the key functions, relationships, issues, problems and dilemmas, and argues for the role of inside counsel as lawyer-statesman, motivated not just by the desire for income but by broader values of integrity and corporate citizenship.
