The Legal Guy

Along with increased emphasis on laborious corporate compliance details, greater independence of corporate directors and heightened pressures on general counsel comes another post-Sarbanes-Oxley Act trend: more lawyers in the boardroom. While some boards retain outside counsel to attend all meetings and advise them on an ongoing basis, others do so on a more limited basis. The trend highlights the potential for tension in the boardroom with the presence of both directors' lawyers and general counsel.

Major brokerage firms are agreeing to buy back billions of dollars of outstanding auction-rate securities -- a welcome surprise for investors, whose assets lost liquidity overnight when the market for the securities collapsed in February. The giant buyback agreements represent a novel approach to resolving regulatory investigations. But equally, if not more, interesting is the profound impact they will likely have on the considerable private litigation begun in the past six months.

The sudden downfall of Bear Stearns was apparently a call to arms for stock market regulators. The events surrounding Bear Stearns, and the renewed debate about how to crack down on market manipulation based on false rumors, are fresh reminders that companies had best take steps to ensure their employees are careful not to cross the line when gossiping with Wall Street colleagues about the market, say attorneys David Meister, Steven F. Gatti and Christopher Lane.

A $1.75 billion land purchase by the state of Florida is more than just the latest step in restoring the Everglades ecosystem. The complicated deal is also bringing together two former legal foes: Edward Almeida, the general counsel of United States Sugar Corp., and Eric Buermann, an attorney who chairs the board of the South Florida Water Management District. The state's purchase of 187,000 acres of farmland from U.S. Sugar will put the Clewiston, Fla.-based company out of business.

The legal profession has come a long way when it comes to in-house counsel blowing the whistle, says attorney C. Evan Stewart. Not only have we loosened our ethical obligations to clients, we have created the means by which we now can sue clients for discharge, using privileged communications against them. This, in Stewart's view, is a slippery slide away from the ideals of zealous client representation, based upon the principle of clients' absolute confidence in their attorneys' duty of confidentiality.

As of Jan. 1, 2008, Pfizer is giving almost all of its U.S. labor and employment work to Jackson Lewis for the next two years. In return, Jackson Lewis has agreed to an annual cap on its fees -- no billable hours or even flat per-matter fees. Margaret Madden, head of Pfizer's employment law group, described how her group decided to adopt a national counsel model and how it settled on Jackson Lewis.

When there are fireworks at a Capitol Hill hearing, the lawyers sit next to their clients and, at each pause, whisper something that we can only guess is a variant of "shut up." But the witnesses at a recent Senate hearing were the lawyers: the top in-house attorneys for Microsoft Corp., Google Inc., and Yahoo Inc. And they put on a show they might have advised their clients to shun. At times the legal chiefs treated the room as though it were the OK Corral.

A growing number of employers are hiring private investigators to spy on employees suspected of taking leave dishonestly under the Family Medical Leave Act. Management-side attorneys claim that FMLA abuses have gotten out of hand, noting that private investigators have caught employees bowling, doing yard work or holding second jobs when they're supposed to be out on sick leave. Employee-rights attorneys, meanwhile, view surveillance as harassment, intimidation and an interference with workers' rights.

The stars -- that is, the usual megafirms -- top 's Who Represents America's Biggest Companies survey yet again. But the place order gives a revealing look into what's irking corporate America today. Workplace issues are among companies' biggest concerns. The evidence? Morgan, Lewis & Bockius took the No. 1 spot, with half of the matters captured in the survey related to employment and labor.