Lawyers on the Board
The Practice
May/June 2020
Evidence suggests that an increasing number of banks and financial institutions now include lawyer-directors on their boards. Why? And what avenues did such lawyers take into the boardroom?
May/June 2020
Banking on the Lawyers
Banks are subject to a broader range of risks than most nonbanks, requiring their directors to possess special skills to effectively manage that risk. The challenge for regulation (and regulators) is to manage a bank’s risk-taking while being flexible enough for the bank’s directors to pursue risky projects that can enhance bank value.
What Boards Want
How do lawyer-directors fit into the bigger picture of a board’s needs and composition? What are companies looking for in prospective board members? What skills and approaches are particularly valuable in the boardroom? What bearing does professional background and training have on these factors?
Lawyer-Director or Director-Lawyer?
Data in “Banking on the Lawyers” and elsewhere shows an increasing trend of lawyers entering boardrooms. Within that broad finding are lived experiences exemplified by the stories of Maria Green, Peggy Heeg, and Peter Solmssen. Despite taking different paths to the boardroom, all three lawyers stress the importance of business acumen, operational perspective, and a deep understanding of the company as critical skill sets for directors.
A Flurry of Advice for Board Directors
As the global pandemic forces companies to adjust their business processes to the new (and ever-evolving) “normal,” boards of directors face a myriad of challenges that they have likely never seen before. As boards come together on Zoom and other videoconferencing software to perform their governance and oversight duties in the time of COVID-19, there has been no shortage of advice from professional service firms.
Getting Everyone on Board
The Harvard Law School case study, "A Difficult Decision with the Board,” follows Manny Vargas, general counsel for the publicly traded Fortune 1,000 aerospace firm Calero Corporation, as he tries to carry out a challenging assignment from the company’s new CEO, Lars Neilson. The study helps us examine more closely the general counsel’s relationship with the board.
The Broad-Gauged Adviser
We’re entering an era where it’s becoming increasingly difficult to separate your business life from your personal life, and the question is how to reconstruct that in a meaningful way and how to allow society to be a place that benefits all of us. In this Q&A, David Wilkins speaks with Ken Chenault, chairman and managing director at General Catalyst and former chairman and CEO of American Express.
