As general counsel, you may need to ask yourself: “Have I incentivized outside counsel to act as a hired gun?” Hopefully the answer to that question is an emphatic no. A hired gun attorney engages in questionable practices such as filing weak cases and harassing legitimate competitors with litigation tactics solely meant to increase costs and create delays. Sometimes hired gun attorneys slavishly execute their clients’ misplaced and unethical orders. In other cases, hired gun attorneys confuse their honest, overly zealous advocacy with the appropriate representation of their client’s business goals and values.
This article is a follow-up to a piece that one of us wrote for Corporate Counsel called “Reconstructing the Role of the CLO” (July 6, 2016), which focused on integrity building within organizations. Here we will provide advice on how general counsel can extend company ethics and values to external counsel, or correct problems that arise when external counsel behave like hired guns.
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