Managing Partner Carol L. O’Riordan will be the featured speaker on the evening of November 18, 2014, at a meeting of the Institute for Supply Management, National Capital Area, Inc. Ms. O’Riordan will speak on the topic of “Supply Chain: Government Contracts and Procurement Concerns.” The event will take place from 4:45 to 6:15 pm....
Counsel Needs to Focus on Developing Company’s Legal IQ
By Carol L. O’Riordan A current article in Corporate Counsel magazine asks the critical question: What’s your company’s legal IQ? The article points out that these days, legal issues are often quite diffused within sizable companies, so that managers don’t always recognize them as such. In addition, corporate legal departments haven’t necessarily done a good job...
As DOJ Gets Tough on Fraud, Compliance Needs to Ramp Up
By Pamela J. Bethel On September 17, 2014, Leslie Caldwell, assistant U.S. attorney general in charge of the Criminal Division, addressed many key issues about the federal False Claims Act in a major speech at the Taxpayers Against Fraud Education Fund Conference in Washington, D.C. The Taxpayers Against Fraud Education Fund brings together whistleblowers who...
Compliance Issues in Government Contracts: Not Just for the Lawyers
By Carol L. O’Riordan It’s clear from a great many recent news articles that if you are a government contractor, putting in a successful bid and being selected for a contract is only the beginning. A great many requirements, some of them onerous, come with a federal contract, including compliance with applicable laws and regulations....
In-House GC’s: Their Crucial Role in Corporate Compliance
By Pamela J. Bethel What role should in-house lawyers play in assuring that corporate compliance standards are met? Should companies have a separate compliance department, or should it be part of the legal department and report to the general counsel? Mitratech, an Austin, Tex.-based consulting firm that works with corporate legal departments, just issued a...
A Big Win for Privilege in Internal Corporate Investigations
By Pamela J. Bethel Last May, we wrote in this blog that we hoped and expected the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to reverse a district judge’s opinion and to permit companies to assert attorney-client privilege for internal documents created in the course of a bona fide investigation by inside counsel. If...
New Article: Putting Profitability Into the Pipeline
On August 14, 2014, partner Carol L. O’Riordan and associate Anthony J. Marchese published an article titled “Putting Organization, Compliance and Improved Profitability into the Pipeline” in the Utility Contractor magazine. The article notes that after a contract is signed and while work is proceeding, a company, such as a construction company, should name one...
Is it Safer to Discuss Some Things with Outside Counsel? (Pt. 3)
By Carol O’Riordan and Jay Shah In our last blog post, we discussed a recent New Mexico case in which the court wrestled with the question of how to determine whether a communication was primarily made for business purposes or for legal purposes. This question was important because it was the deciding factor in showing...
Is it Safer to Discuss Some Things with Outside Counsel? (Pt. 2)
By Carol O’Riordan and Jay Shah How should courts go about deciding, in close cases, whether an internal memorandum constitutes privileged legal advice or discoverable business advice? Bhandari v. Artesia Gen. Hospital, the New Mexico case discussed in our previous post, is illustrative. It involved an employment dispute between a hospital corporation and two doctors...
Is it Safer to Discuss Some Things with Outside Counsel?
By Carol O’Riordan and Jay Shah Does the attorney-client privilege apply less definitively to in-house counsel than to outside attorneys? About a year ago, the New Mexico Court of Appeals ruled in Bhandari v. Artesia General Hospital that a memo written by a hospital’s general counsel regarding an employee’s termination was not privileged because it...