When Cynthia Lewin left her post as general counsel of National Wildlife Federation to run the legal department at AARP in 2010, the first thing she did was look for places to trim legal expenses at the 37-million member organization. The AARP’s lawyers, she found, were spending a lot of time relaying information from inside the organization to outside law firms.
"They were interpreting the question to outside counsel and then interpreting the response," she said. "These were people that had been there a long time. I said, ‘I can see from the way you’re framing the question, you know the answer. So let’s stop sending it to outside counsel. If you need a second opinion on something I can give it to you.’ "
