It's been a persistent theme of this column that, in the current business environment, there is compelling need for chief legal officers to play more strategic business roles as C-suite advisors and on boards of directors (an increasingly common phenomenon). Extraordinarily diverse issues now flash across the GC's radar screen, transcending the limits of strictly legal oversight.

Two events that occurred this spring underscore this diversity.

First, on April 2, 2014, the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts, overturned the section of federal election law setting “aggregate limits” on campaign contributions. In McCutcheon v. FEC, brought by engineer and businessman Shaun McCutcheon as a First Amendment case, McCutcheon's team successfully argued that donors can give allowable contributions to as many politicians as they'd like.