Joe Quigley, Vice President, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary of The Highlights Foundation, Inc. September 3, 2019.

Joe Quigley's day-to-day duties as the top lawyer at Columbus, Ohio-based magazine and book publishing company Highlights For Children are as varied as his background. Of course, the intellectual property and content specialist turned self-described generalist who previously worked in-house at The Walt Disney Co. followed by stints at retail giants Nike Inc., Kate Spade and L Brands pretty much has to handle everything that comes in the door after he cut his department's outside legal spend by about 72% in his first year as general counsel and corporate secretary.

Quigley, who manages a department of just himself and a paralegal, spoke about the challenges and highlights of handling all of the legal affairs of a business with a mission that believes "children are the world's most important people."

What were some of the challenges of bringing all of that work in-house?

Anytime you make change to an organization, there's going to be some resistance. But when I finally got to explain to [business colleagues] that this will directly affect your [profit and loss]—and after about a year or so, when they see that actually that's the case—then they're happy.

How is being at Highlights different from your time at the large, public companies where you previously worked?

In those companies, you have a fair amount of people who, for lack of a better word, are watching other people work. With these upper management levels, they're not really doing the work of the work, but you still have to always keep them in the loop or make sure that you're respecting their territory. I just got really tired of that because it got in the way of doing good work.

And then there's the idea of being with a mission-driven company. Highlights is the first company I've ever been where they not only talk the talk, they really walk the walk. Highlights magazine has been around for almost 75 years and has never once had an advertisement in it—that is leaving a lot of money on the table, and I have a respect for that.

Is that why Highlights took the arguably controversial move in June to denounce the Trump administration's separation of migrant families in a statement posted to Twitter?

That was a really big step for us and wasn't done without a lot of discussion. But I think ultimately if your mission statement is "children are the world's most important people," and you don't say anything, what's the point of having that mission?

What do you see as one of the biggest challenges for in-house legal departments coming down the pike?

With the way business is conducted now and the moves in Europe and now California, I think privacy is going to be a huge issue for companies. If there's going to be a private right of action under these laws, that's the next really fertile area for plaintiff's counsel.