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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;
• Develop the outline of how they
would go about assessing the
legal risk to Amec Tek based on
existing practices;
• Develop the outline of a remediation plan for Amec Tek, including the design of new internal
controls;
• Develop a strategy for assessing
additional resources needed to
bring Amec Tek into compliance,
budget development, and management involvement;
• Develop a strategy for internal