12:00 PM  - 4:00 PM

Following the success of last year’s event, ACC is pleased to include the 2nd annual ACC Gives Back! as part of the 2012 Corporate Counsel University. Attendees of CCU will have the opportunity to give back to a Los Angeles community in need by joining us for a community outreach event on Sunday, May 20. Come to Los Angeles early to join us for this great opportunity to get to know your peers and give back to the community. There is no additional cost for CCU attendees to participate, and lunch and tools will be provided. If you are interested in participating, please indicate as such when registering.

5:30 PM  - 6:30 PM

8:00 AM  - 9:00 AM

9:00 AM  - 10:30 AM

Negotiation skills are critical in a multitude of personal and professional relationships, and many lawyers - both new and seasoned - seek the necessary skills to achieve the desired outcome while creating synergy and fostering good, long-term relationships. This session offers strategies to best obtain value and profitability in your negotiations, identify and neutralize difficult negotiators and their tactics, tailor your negotiation style to suit different settings, examine practical ethical issues lawyers face in negotiation, and recognize and address common pitfalls and problems typically encountered in negotiations.

11:00 AM  - 12:30 PM

If you’ve been a litigator on the outside, welcome to a whole new ball game. As in-house counsel, your focus is not just on getting those pleadings filed, but also implementing litigation holds, managing outside counsel, conducting investigations, analyzing your position, determining strategy, and much more. And it is not just about conducting the litigation. It is also about taking steps and creating programs to avoid litigation, performing cost benefit analysis and risk assessment to determine whether to get in, stay in, or get out, and conducting a thorough post mortem of each case so that you acquire a very long educational list of “lessons learned” that will direct you in the future. Come learn from our panel of experts who have “been there, done that.”

D&O insurance can play a critical role in funding bet-the-company litigation and protecting the company's directors and officers. Seemingly innocuous differences in policy wording can make a critical difference in determining whether coverage is in fact available when a claim is made. This session will address policy wording, which requires special attention when coverage is purchased, negotiating strategies with your proposed insurance carrier and key provisions which may come into play once a claim is made.

12:45 PM  - 2:00 PM

Starting off with a bang – In this session, a panel of GCs will share their practical advice and best practices for working your way to the top of the legal ladder. What are GCs looking for in up-and-coming staff? What skills training will best prepare you for your career? How can you best adapt to the differences between working at a firm and becoming comfortable in-house? What are the best practices for coping with being a generalist? These questions and more will be answered and discussed in this special lunch session.

2:00 PM  - 3:30 PM

The employment relationship is a complex, rapidly changing area of the law. This survey program will cover the basics such as investigating internal complaints, responding to government investigations, addressing ADA and accommodation issues, managing overtime pay and FLSA classification compliance, handling leave issues, and avoiding retaliation claims. The course will also cover emerging issues such as social media, diversity programs, genetic information discrimination, and class action waivers.

Now that both parties have negotiated and agreed on the contract, you can’t just sit back and let the contract take care of itself. This session will address the best practices for creating and maintaining a corporate contract management repository within the legal department that fully addresses the contract lifecycle. This program will also discuss transparency, profiling, and archiving.

4:00 PM  - 5:30 PM

Why do we have compliance programs and what does it take to make them Effective with a capital “E?” Why do we care? What is the role of in-house counsel in making sure that effectiveness is achieved and delivered? Effective ethics and compliance programs are important both preventatively – to make sure that bad conduct does not occur – and after the fact – to make sure that bad conduct gets addressed so it doesn’t continue and won’t happen again. Moreover, not having an effective program can have disastrous consequences. Come learn how to develop it into much more than a code of conduct gathering dust on the shelf.

5:30 PM  - 6:30 PM

8:00 AM  - 9:00 AM

9:00 AM  - 10:30 AM

The ability to effectively manage outside counsel is essential to the success of in-house lawyers. Learn tips on selecting, evaluating, comparing, and retaining the outside counsel that best suit the organizational needs of your company, developing lists of providers and criteria for preferred legal service providers and specialized firms, implementing alternative billing models, and using legal project and process management techniques with your outside counsel to streamline your engagements.

Social media is everywhere and is setting new rules of engagement. This session will address how to identify the legal risks and potential rewards presented by company, employee, and third party use of social media, as well as the law department’s role in helping the company craft effective social networking and electronic usage policies, mitigate risks associated with social networking and address social networking in the recruiting and hiring process.

11:00 AM  - 12:30 PM

The recent high number of corporate bankruptcies points to the importance of strong risk management practices. No, you won’t have to wear a green eyeshade and crunch numbers. However, smart in-house counsel understand they must be knowledgeable about finance and accounting issues in a strong risk management framework. Increasingly companies need lawyers who can anticipate problem areas before they arise. We’ll introduce you to the basics of finance and accounting, risk management “best practices” and help you identify what financial red flags look like, gain greater understanding of key financial documents including corporate financial statements, and enhance your risk management toolkit.

12:45 PM  - 2:00 PM

2:00 PM  - 3:30 PM

Smart companies plan, measure results and demonstrate success. The legal department within those companies needs to follow suit. Demonstrating to your client that you add value is critical. This program will teach the in’s and out’s of strategic planning and effective metrics development that will help you demonstrate your department’s successes and show your boss how you add value to the company’s bottom line.

You may not know it, but intellectual property considerations and implications are everywhere in your company. And if you think you are immune, or it is someone else’s job because you practice real estate, or employment, or tax law, or are a generalist, then think again. Copyright, trademark, licensing, trade secrets, patent matters, and other IP issues can raise their heads almost anywhere. This session will help you identify what these issues look like so that you can respond accordingly. It will also teach you to take the necessary steps to protect valuable corporate assets and not infringe on the intellectual property rights of others.

4:00 PM  - 5:30 PM

Movie lawyers lead tough lives, particularly corporate lawyers. From the 1976 film Network to the 2007 film Michael Clayton, the fantastic situations of our big screen counterparts offer real world lessons. Using short film clips of ethically challenged movie lawyers to illustrate the requirements of the rules of professional responsibility, Hollywood’s portrayal of corporate counsel enables us to demonstrate practical requirements of the rules of ethics. By drawing on familiar movies, this session enhances audience interaction and provides very tangible examples of the rules in action. From negotiation ethics to privilege, dealing with employees to document retention, audience participants will be encouraged to opine regarding their views of the movie lawyer behavior, and the panel of both in-house and outside counsel will draw from the film examples to present other hypotheticals and examples that will keep the program grounded in real world application to the practicing lawyer.