It’s fair to say that Thomas Sager, general counsel at chemical giant DuPont doesn’t follow legal trends. He starts them.
Sager championed the “DuPont model” (outsourcing a portion of a company’s legal work overseas or to lower-cost temp agencies), which is now standard operating procedure in many legal departments. In addition to advocating outsourcing, he led the charge among general counsel to winnow their rosters of outside firms — a process he started at DuPont in the mid-1990s and continued to push during the past 10 years. Sager also has been an out-front advocate of diversity in legal departments and firms, and the Minority Corporate Counsel Association now gives an award bearing his name.
