When the chairman of a FTSE 100 company complained during a board meeting that the room was too hot, the colleague he ordered to rectify the problem was not the chief executive or head of the audit committee but the company secretary, who also happened to be the general counsel.
Such an anecdote illustrates the plight of many general counsel as they scrabble to gain influence in the upper echelons of UK plc. They have not traditionally enjoyed the status of other senior managers and, in contrast to US counterparts, have been granted only limited access to top-level meetings.
