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Role and Function of Company Lawyers

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The Company Legal Department
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Abstract

Any company lawyer will naturally regard his own department as being one of the most important management units in the company, but this is probably not the right way to look at a company law department. There are very definite expectations which management has concerning the work of a company law department and it is, therefore, not surprising that executives and heads of companies from time to time have expressed these expectations very clearly. H.B. Woodman answered the question ‘What does the corporate executive expect of the corporate law department?’ with the very simple words ‘the impossible’. He explained in an article in ‘The Business Lawyer’1 that the corporate executive expects ‘the legal department to provide competent, skilled, objective, professional legal advice and performance and, at the same time, to be an integral going part of a going business — both in the more or less truly legal activities of the department and in accepting many assignments which are essentially non-legal in nature’.

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© 1979 Springer Science+Business Media New York

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Kolvenbach, W. (1979). Role and Function of Company Lawyers. In: The Company Legal Department. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-4485-0_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-4485-0_2

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht

  • Print ISBN: 978-90-312-0089-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-94-017-4485-0

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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