Can GCs Perform a Compliance Role and Act as Strategic Advisors?

Today, general counsels play increasingly expansive roles, acting as both a legal adviser on business strategy and a gatekeeper with compliance responsibilities.

But do those two roles come into conflict? That’s the question that University of Michigan business school professor H. Nejat Seyhun, and his co-author S. Burcu Avci, put forth in a paper released this summer. The title of the paper, “Why Don’t General Counsels Stop Corporate Crime?” suggests their answer — namely that general counsels are not effective in a compliance role.

To reach their conclusion, Seyhun and Avci looked at 131 securities fraud class-action settlements from between 1996 and 2014, each of which settled for at least $25 million. ...