Last month, Richard Chambers shared his experience and the challenges he had working with the General Counsel in Internal Audit’s Relationship With the General Counsel Can Be Complicated.
My and Richard’s experience is very different, even though between us we have more than 40 years as internal audit leaders. His was with US government agencies while mine was with for-profit global corporations.
As a CAE, I worked with a number of General Counsels (GC) and they were all different: different personalities, different approaches to their work, and different attitudes towards risk management and internal audit.
I worked with them in several ways:
- Collaborating on the development of ethics and related policies. In some cases, I wrote the first draft which was then completed by the GC. At one company, we co-chaired the (management) Ethics Council.
- Engaging them (sometimes reluctantly) on investigations by my team. One attorney shied away from them, while at another company the GC tried (without great success) to tell me how to do my job. Performing investigations “at the direction of counsel” to protect related documents, etc. is important. But that doesn’t mean they tell me how to investigate.
- Discussing ‘difficult’ issues where, if we are not careful, reporting could create a legal risk for the…
