GC agenda must include ethics

In an article for Legal Business magazine, Paul Gilbert of LBC Wise Counsel has warned that the current regulatory environment meant that GCs could face prison over technical breaches of regulations. 'Given all that has happened in banking in the last few years, I do not think we are far away from GCs going to prison. We have all seen the examples of traders 'bantering' and what that now means for some of them.' He asked: 'Are we so far away from seeing a GC being asked under caution how it could possibly be the case that the commerical shipwreck of a deal they oversaw was using a map they had drawn and a course they had set?' He said the threat needed to be in the mindset of every GC. The in-house community must  put ethics on the agenda and create guidelines to help in-house lawyers deal with such issues, Mr Gilbert said, adding that a serious debate on the role of general counse was necessary. 'What are they responsible for? What is not in scope?' He also asked if regulators should be able to rely on the GC to assure ethical behaviour on the part of all the lawyers in the business. Source: Legal Business