Ben Heineman, Jr., never planned on becoming general counsel of a major multinational corporation. But in 1987 Jack Welch tapped the then-Supreme Court litigator for the GC position at General Electric after a 20-minute interview. What followed was a career that helped transform the in-house legal profession.
Since his so-called retirement in 2005 Heineman has been a busy writer and advocate for in-house counsel, continuing to articulate how the parameters of the profession have changed. A senior fellow at Harvard’s schools of law and government, and a lecturer at Yale, Heineman writes frequently for publications including The Atlantic and Harvard Business Review. The ideas from his essay “The General Counsel as Lawyer-Statesman” appeared in his forward to the recently released Indispensable Counsel: The Chief Legal Officer in the New Reality.
