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Game Plan: Womble Carlyle Session at ACC
ACES 2015 Uses Hypothetical Exercise to
Build Collaborative Skills

The general counsel of Amec Tek, a global software solutions company, faced a daunting challenge.

A proposed new law would require corporate officers, under individual criminal penalty, to certify that all independent contractors are properly classified under federal, state and international laws, and that all contractors’ employees are properly classified for FLSA purposes.

However, when the general counsel spoke with the company’s HR director, she learned that many workers were misclassified, and that Amec Tek’s chief executive officer had pressured the HR department to inaccurately categorize workers in order to save money.

It is a hypothetical scenario, but
in-house counsel often must contend
with similar situations. At the As-
sociation of Corporate Counsel’s
Advanced Compliance Educa-
tion Summit (ACES), which took
place April 26-28 in New Orleans,
in-house attorneys participated in
a dynamic and interactive tabletop
exercise designed to foster collabora-
tion and innovative problem solving.

Womble Carlyle attorneys Alison Bost, Brent Clinkscale, Meredith McKee, Claire Rauscher and Mark Schamel, Boeing Company Ethics and Compliance Chief Counsel Stephen Epstein, and American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

Chief Financial Officer/Chief Legal Officer Colleen Struss led the exercise.

Womble Carlyle, a full-service law firm serving middle market companies, is the sponsor of the ACC’s Compliance and Ethics Committee.

For this exercise, in-house attorney participants in the program were divided into teams of six to eight people.

Each team was assigned a facilitator to help direct the conversation.

The teams spent approximately 15
minutes discussing the scenario and
brainstorming possible approaches to
address the Amec Tek dilemma. Bost
said the following questions were as-
signed to various teams to address:
• Discuss what else the general
counsel should do to investigate
this matter and gather necessary
information;