When Mobil merged with rival US oil giant Exxon in 1999, the company’s legal team had some 275 contract staff – a third of whom were lawyers – working alongside its existing team of 240 lawyers.
According to Bjarnie Anderson, who worked at Mobil at the time and is now projects and operations officer at Barclays Bank, one of the main reasons for hiring so many lawyers on a short-term basis was the due diligence process and the need to get antitrust approval for the merger from the US regulator, the Federal Trade Commission. This meant that the oil company’s legal team had to sift through some 12 million documents globally and assess their relevance.
