As the world has been asked to “reduce, reuse and recycle,” so too has the climate changed for in-house counsel. “In the past, there may have been one or two hot button issues, but today, there are a myriad of issues confronting in-house practitioners that run the gamut from attorney-client privilege and electronic social media to employment law and the environment,” said Allison Hoffman, senior vice president and chief legal officer of Incisive Media-North America, the parent company of the New York Law Journal. “Everything that we do as in-house counsel has a liability component to it.”
Although no new claim trends against in-house counsel have emerged in 2009, the atmosphere is polluted with an unemployment rate of 9.5 percent,[FOOTNOTE 1] liquidity crisis, congressional investigations, collapse of industry giants, massive frauds via Ponzi schemes, regulations to help the planet “go green,” shrinking legal departments, pandemics, an explosion of online modes of communication, and new rules for a broad cross-section of industries.
