Sweeping out corporate flaws

The irony of the venue of last week's Global Corporate Counsel Association meeting - the Trianon Palace in Versailles - will not have been lost on the US in-house corporate lawyers attending the gathering.

Back home, post-Enron, lawyers at Andersens are staring the guillotine in the face after alleged collusion over the shredding machines.

The clear message from the US practitioners at the conference was that in-house lawyers need to stand up to company directors who might espouse short-term commercial interests over the values of longer-term integrity.

There has been a sea change in recent months in the way that the federal authorities in the US view in-house counsel.

According to some delegates at the conference, government officials rightly or wrongly see

in-house lawyers as businessmen who in some instances obstruct the course of justice.

One hopes that is not the case, but it will be for US lawyers to put their own authorities at ease.

Lawyers here should not busy themselves with their knitting while heads roll in the States.

In many EU countries, in-house lawyers are seen as second-class professionals, and denied membership of their local bars and law societies.

In the UK, they are at least trusted to be lawyers first and company employees second.

But the European Commission has still to be convinced of in-house lawyers' trustworthiness.

And the Enron debacle is only likely to damage the long-running European Companies Lawyers Association campaign to persuade it to recognise the status of in-house lawyers and their rights of legal professional privilege.