“Bad things happen, and you can’t do anything about it.” So says Timon to Simba, during a low point in the future Lion King’s adventures. You would not expect Brackett Denniston, general counsel of General Electric (GE), to be an adherent of such a defeatist philosophy. Sure enough, he adopts a distinctly more upbeat approach to life. “Do your job well and good things will happen to you,” he tells Legal Week in an in-depth interview this week. Although, like any good lawyer, he is quick to qualify his remark with the proviso that this will be the case “most of the time”. The occasion for the interview is the forthcoming Legal Week Corporate Counsel Forum, which takes place in Paris on 10-12 May, 2006, and is being chaired by Denniston, who will also deliver the keynote speech.
It will be interesting to hear Denniston flesh out his approach to compliance, and how he sets out to get senior management to “live and breathe” it. But the role of general counsel is not confined to wrestling with such elusive concepts. Denniston is responsible for overseeing a 1,000-strong legal department spread across the globe. You cannot get much more practical than that.
