FRSGlobal

General Counsel / VP of Legal

As a General Counsel or VP of Legal in a financial services firm, you have one primary objective: to ensure the company is operating within the law at all times. To do this, you must be aware of all transactions the company is engaged in including those that may be in only the preliminary stages. This helps ensure limited risk exposure to the bottom line, personnel and the company's public image. In your role, you are expected to catch problems not traditionally associated with legal advice early on, such as an employee engaging in questionable personal activities or malicious websites posing to be that of the actual company. In many financial services firms, a general counsel is also seen as a business partner and may oversee corporate audit and compliance functions to ensure they are aligned with the objectives of the business and the legal department.

Key Challenges

As financial firms are pressured for higher performance, regulators increase their oversight, and the need for both a more comprehensive as well as a deeper understanding of internal practices and compliance becomes more important, you may be experiencing some or all of these typical challenges:

• identifying, managing and mitigating of legal risk issues across the firm
• leading the development of a firm wide legal and risk strategy
• ensuring that the firm complies with legislation, regulation and the requirements of professional bodies and other organisations, including interpreting the effect on the firm of any proposed changes to legislation
• proactively managing potentially adverse legal, regulatory and financial risks
• providing preventative legal guidance and risk training to the firm
• recommending/drafting formal legal responses to issues
• monitoring commercial law changes and drafting best practice notes on topical issues for use across the firm
• providing legal support in relation to the entering into of contacts with the firm’s clients

How We Help

Wolters Kluwer/FRSGlobal recognizes the unique challenges of the General Counsel and VP of Legal. Our solutions are designed and proven enterprise systems, with over 15,000 customers worldwide. Specifically, we can help through all of these key elements of our product and service offerings:

• our understanding of your need to increase staff efficiency and to help drive productivity in the face of expanding assignments and management requests
• global expertise in compliance and regulatory reporting to supplement the expertise of your staff
• practical tools to track and monitor regulations globally, with hands-on recommendations on implementing best practices compliance programmes
• proactive monitoring of regulatory activities and enforcement actions globally
• support for the distribution of critical regulatory information internally
• staff training, education, and certification to ensure your firm is effective in the markets served and meets regulatory thresholds and requirements
• cost effective products for monitoring critical areas of compliance (e.g. insider trading)
• the ability to tap into our base of over 400 regulatory, risk, and compliance experts for best practices and practical guidance and advice

Next Steps

For more information, check out the Solutions section, or contact us for more information.