The Legal Intelligencer will be honoring Pennsylvania’s best in-house legal departments in a magazine to be published April 8. To select the winners, we asked members of the legal community—at law firms, corporations and otherwise—to tell us what made a certain department stand out over the past couple of years. Did they face and deal with difficult litigation? Were they involved in major transactions? Did the department innovate to overcome a challenge? Is the department using technology in new and interesting ways?
We took nominations from companies and their clients, and we also reached out to our sources in the legal community to get their impressions about which legal departments deserve special recognition. Through a combination of reporting and nominations, we settled on the following five legal departments as deserving of top honors:
- FMC Corp.’s legal department excelled in litigation, protecting the company from Department of Justice prosecution while other manufacturers were convicted and limiting a fine in the European Union to a small percentage of what others paid.
- Comcast Cable Communications’ legal department demonstrated a commitment to diversity and achieved a critical victory in Comcast v. Behrend, protecting the company from a class action lawsuit in a case with broad application regarding class certification.
- Kennametal Inc.’s legal department excelled in in-house management, using its small staff to initiate legal administration processes, ensuring the company remains ethically conscious and plays a key role in business development.
- Hershey Entertainment & Resorts Co.’s legal department emphasized the value of community service in addition to its attention to the myriad legal challenges facing the company, always maintaining a focus on the core values of the company and its founder, as shown in the department’s work with the Milton Hershey School.
- Duquesne Light demonstrated an excellence in innovation for its work over the past few years in developing a more formalized legal department; creating an office of general counsel that uniquely includes not only lawyers but also the risk management and internal audit components of the company; working to recover millions of dollars a year for the company through litigation; assigning a lawyer to each business unit; significantly reducing outside counsel and growing in-house capabilities while reducing overall spend; and managing litigation and regulatory concerns in multiple jurisdictions.
