R. McConnell Group PLLC focuses on providing exceptional service to clients using an efficient and client-oriented platform. Clients love our work because it is bespoke and designed around their businesses. Each team member at the firm has a growth mindset with one focus—our clients. Our team is biased to action and obsessive about solving our clients’ problems.
Our corporate governance and compliance practice focuses on creating effective solutions for a diverse group of clients ranging from financial technology to telecom companies. From drafting bylaws to delegations of authority, our work has spanned a number of industries around the globe. We regularly advise corporate boards and company leadership on a wide range of risk and regulatory issues, including creating board materials for quarterly meetings and advising boards on sensitive 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 corporate governance work, we have helped companies build regulatory compliance programs covering a number of subject matters from ESG to anti-money laundering to privacy. Our compliance work leverages our deep experience defending criminal cases and interacting with regulators to design custom programs that are aligned to and seamlessly integrated into our clients’ businesses. Our work typically focuses on general program design and implementation (e.g., developing a risk assessment process or training program) as well as subject matter-specific work (e.g., conducting anti-corruption due diligence, creating OFAC policies, or designing a privacy framework). We regularly provide legal advice across a wide variety of subject matters and have developed M&A compliance guidance addressing integration and due diligence issues.
Our firm has created best in class materials on due diligence, business integration, and risk management. Our lawyers have conducted hundreds of risk assessments, program reviews, and other compliance program measurements for the world’s leading companies, often involving in-country work by firm lawyers on virtually every continent. Our firm has also created free tools to help clients design compliance programs tailored to their businesses using different 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. Clients routinely ask us to help present their compliance programs to regulators, corporate boards, and other stakeholders. We have addressed virtually every type of compliance challenge, from data privacy best practices to trade control risk analyses.
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), and by 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). Other recent projects include:
Our compliance practice draws not only on our experience helping the best 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 leading 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 2012-2014 that 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 our firm 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.
Our firm always leads and never copies. Our lawyers are the best at what they do. Our work is second to none.