Note: This article has been updated for clarity.
Fresh off a spike in state-level legal reforms favoring businesses in 2011, on Tuesday Lisa Rickard, the president of the U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform (ILR), visited the CorpCounsel offices to discuss some of her organization’s approaches and priorities for 2012.
As an affiliate of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, ILR advocates for the business community on a broad range of issues related to legal reform. The organization is faced with a myriad of high-stakes—and very public—issues with far-reaching ramifications for the business community and the national political conversation.
Rickard said that she had witnessed a significant amount of successful reform in the nine years since she joined ILR. Nationally, tort costs have dropped dramatically between 2003 and 2009.
But there is still work to be done.
Weighing in on issues from large and small businesses across the country, ILR engages with stakeholders from all possible corners. Sometimes voices within its own membership are at odds, and Rickard said that ILR makes it clear that there are some battles that it simply can’t take on.
ILR uses a strategic approach to laying the groundwork on pro-business positions it thinks it should adopt. Rickard said that they have identified four key focus areas for the coming year: overregulation, over-criminalization, the commercialization of litigation, and roadblocks to globalization.
The uptick in FCPA enforcement has been an area of particular concern to ILR in recent years. From 2009 to 2010, the number of enforcement actions doubled, and activity by the Justice Department and U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission increased 40-fold in the last decade. A major concern to ILR is the lack of credit afforded corporations for self-reporting, and a frequent lack of clarification in how the law should be applied.
On the regulation front, the organization has also criticized incentives that lure corporate whistleblowers to make end-runs around internal compliance departments, specifically the SEC’s new whistleblower program.
While the U.S. Supreme Court has upheld mandatory arbitration agreements and class action waivers in the past year, Rickard said the ILR is particularly concerned on the arbitration front. The National Labor Relations Board, some members of Congress, and some Consumer Financial Protection Bureau staff have not seen eye-to-eye with ILR on these issues.
Rickard noted that the fervor of the plaintiffs bar has influenced the ILR’s agenda on several fronts. A particular surge in third-party litigation funding and lawsuit lending poses particular concern for general counsel, she said.
Despite the American Bar Association’s indecisive stance on the issue thus far, Rickard said, “This is clearly an area that we ask ourselves, from an ethics perspective: As lawyers, is this really the way that we want the practice of law to go?”
