The Inside Counsel Revolution: Resolving the Partner-Guardian Tension

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.