This ongoing semi-annual research initiative was built to understand the primary issues that concern General Counsel (GC) and senior law firm leaders – and how they are tackling those concerns. The survey results are categorised into five critical areas identified through ongoing discussions with GCs: privacy and data security, risk and crisis management, regulations and enforcement, litigation, and intellectual property.

Category specific concerns

Within each category, participants were asked to identify particular areas of concern:

• Privacy and Data Security:hacking/phishing/malware/ransomware (87 per cent), employee mistakes (62 per cent) and risks of breaches via non-law firm vendors (50 per cent)
• Risk and Crisis Management: cybersecurity threats (57 per cent), potential cost/impact on budget (55 per cent) and government/ regulatory investigations (55 per cent)
• Regulations and Enforcement: changes in regulation (65 per cent) and differences in regulations across jurisdictions (64 per cent)
• Litigation: labor and employment (59 per cent), potential cost/impact on budget (57 per cent) and commercial disputes (54 per cent)
• Intellectual Property: enforcing IP rights (67 per cent) and trademark/copyright infringement (60 per cent)

Gain insights into critical GC challenges  

‘We conducted this survey to gain additional insights on the critical challenges facing GCs,’ said Larren Nashelsky, Chair of Morrison & Foerster. ‘Given the demands of the role, it is not surprising that the report shows that many GCs are looking at how best to allocate resources to meet relatively new business needs, like privacy and data security and risk and crisis management. The report highlights opportunities for GCs to prepare more robustly for real-world situations in these areas.’

Eye towards identifying trends

‘Our goal with the GC Up-at-Night Report is to create a longitudinal view of the evolving priorities of GCs, with an eye toward identifying trends, assessing gaps between priorities and resource allocation, and helping GCs benchmark their priorities versus their peers,’ said Andrew Neblett, President of ALM Intelligence. The research was conducted from April to June 2017 polling over 200 US-based in-house counsel decision makers at Fortune 1000 corporations, including: General Counsel, Chief Legal Officer, Head of Legal, or titles of similar seniority.