General Counsel Conference in NYC: coverage of Day 1

We are covering today and tomorrow the 21st Annual Corporate Counsel Conference in New York,  this year’s focus being the wide range of legal, economic and business challenges faced by in-house department leaders in today’s economy.    The conference is presented by Corporate Counsel magazine, in conjunction with Incisive Media Conferences and Trade Shows.

The topics include the “usual suspects”:  the impact of the Obama Administration, the future of antitrust law, IP and the global economy, globalization and the legal function, new SEC, DOJ, FTC, FDIC initiatives, etc. 

One of this morning sessions was devoted to litigation and the financial crisis and myriad of financial calamities that have already produced a small tsunami of shareholder class actions, derivative suits, ERISA claims, insurance coverage disputes and etc.  There was discussion that “much more is on the way”. 

There was also a fair amount of discussion about the new legal, regulatory and compliance risks confronting businesses during this financial crisis and “enterprise risk management”:  how corporations (and law departments) are setting up niche units to address them.  There are a large number of Posse List members who have been getting into this niche area of enterprise risk management based on their document review work and other experience on projects involving legal/regulatory compliance.  It is an area we will expand on next week in our continuing Trend series (click here).

This idea of establishing a “niche” as a solo or freelance attorney based on your own experience was expounded upon by Carolyn Elefant and Susan Carter Liebel in their teleseminar today (click here).  We’ll have a post-teleseminar report later today.

There was also much discussion of the use of solos and freelancers for corporate work in order to save costs.  We’ll expand on this in a later posting.

We saw only two staffing agencies in the exhibit area so far:  Hudson Legal and the Indian LPO, QuisLex.   Our colleague (an associate general counsel)  spoke to both and we’ll report on his conversations in a post later today.  Interesting stuff.

Tomorrow are two of the more interesting seminars for contract attorneys:  legal process outsourcing and electronic discovery.  We have already had some chats with attendees on how certain elements of e-discovery are being brought in-house, as well as the use of contract attorneys at in-house legal departments.

We will add more to this post at the end of the day after the Day 1 sessions are over.