Our board and corporate governance practice focuses on creating effective solutions for the world’s leading companies across virtually every industry. We advise boards and company leadership on a wide range of risk and regulatory issues, including enterprise risk, governance, succession, competency, shareholder activist threats, and other regulatory issues. Our firm also serves as outside general counsel to several startup technology companies, advising on regulatory and governance issues. We are often the first call company leadership or the board makes for advice on the most sensitive legal issues facing the company.
In addition to our board and corporate governance work, we provide legal advice to both private and publicly traded companies on regulatory issues covering a wide span of legal areas and risks, from antitrust to privacy. Our firm has created best-in-class materials on risk management, due diligence, and business integration.
Our lawyers have conducted hundreds of assessments of governance, risk, board committee scope, and compliance with risk assessment regulatory frameworks across virtually every industry. Our firm has also created free tools to help clients design regulatory compliance programs tailored to their businesses using different legal or regulatory frameworks as a foundation. This work may be found here (Compliance by Design) and is regularly reviewed by lawyers across the globe as benchmarking.
Although we do not typically identify our clients, some companies have publicly recognized the firm, including mentions in Corporate Counsel magazine by the world’s largest retailer (Struggling Retail Chains Shop for Lawyers), a global football organization (FIFA’s First Compliance Chief Helping to Get It Back in the Game), one of the world’s leading energy companies as part of our investigation work (Baker Hughes Says Probe of AMLO’s Son’s Home Found No Wrongdoing), and by the National Rifle Association (Under Court Eye, NRA Hires Independent Compliance Expert). Other recent projects include:
Our regulatory compliance practice draws not only on our experience helping the largest companies in the world solve their most important problems, but also on data collected by our firm over the past decade. For example, we created a Fortune 500 code of conduct database with over three years of data hosted by the University of Houston Law Center. This database allows users to benchmark compliance policies set forth in Fortune 500 codes of conduct across more than forty different topic areas. The database may be accessed here. Our firm has used the knowledge in this database to draft codes of conduct across a range of industries, including a global football organization with billions of fans around the world and the world’s largest technology companies. Our firm’s codes of conduct are generally recognized as second to none and uniquely capture the voice of leadership and culture of a company.
For the last decade, we have remained actively involved in educational efforts involving compliance and leading practices on risk and governance. Our lawyers teach a well-regarded class on corporate compliance at the University of Houston Law Center that has been featured in the Wall Street Journal. For the past several years, our firm has participated in Stanford’s prestigious Directors’ College in Palo Alto—a forum on corporate governance to educate the world’s leading board members. In recent years, we helped create online compliance modules at the University of Texas Law School to assist them with education on corporate compliance. This effort may be found here. In 2018, Louisiana State University approached our firm with the task of creating a global ethics center. We also organized the Compliance and Ethics Conference at the University of Houston Law Center from 2012 to 2014, which included world-renowned speakers, including Philip Tetlock, professor and author of Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction
Lawyers around the country frequently follow our lead and reach out to ask about compliance best practices and emerging trends (see, for instance, the firm’s analysis of historical iterations of the DOJ’s corporate compliance guidance). Our firm has published over a hundred articles in Corporate Counsel magazine that have been widely cited and circulated as authority on various compliance issues. We also collected and created the first database of U.S. Department of Justice deferred and non-prosecution agreements that other multi-national firms have adopted into client updates and use as a measure of the firm’s expertise in the white-collar field.
Finally, our firm has worked for several non-profits over the past decade, including hundreds of hours of pro bono work. Recently, we advised a non-profit international relief/humanitarian organization on risk and governance issues and advised a non-profit literary arts organization on litigation matters. One of our partners chairs the governance board of the largest non-profit literary organization in Texas.
Our firm always leads and never copies. Our lawyers are the best at what they do. Our work is second to none. Clients love our work because it is bespoke and designed around each business.