“Referred to the legal
department.”
So
runs the cryptic legend that spells the way of modern business. It threads the maze of operations between
department and department of the great corporation, it broods over the
relations between competitors, between employer and employee, between seller
and buyer, between the governing people and the company governed. It is the
meat in the courteous letter of reply you receive in relation to your complaint;
it is the burden of the newspaper interview in which the magnate comments on a
policy that has been called in question.
It
becomes at once the apotheosis of modern business caution, of modern business
sagacity and economy and foresightedness.
The
general manager of the great industrial or commercial concern inscribes the
notation on the documentary exhibits of a big transaction, dictates a letter
explaining the situation with which he is confronted and dispatches the whole
matter to the department of law experts.
In due course of time the documents return to the desk of the general
manager with one more paper attached—an opinion defining the rights of all the
parties concerned, laying down the law and advising the policy that may with
good judgment be pursued.
In
the complex state of twentieth-century commercial operations no transaction is
too insignificant to receive, at some stage of its history, the attention of
the law department; no new step too sure and confident to be taken without the
support and guidance of the preceptors of legal rights and usage.
The
statistics compiled by the Chicago Bar Association show that about 1,000
attorneys in this city alone are attached to the law department of big
mercantile and manufacturing concerns. More than one hundred business houses
have fully organized legal bureaus that handle all litigation and legal
negotiations from colossal contracts down to garnishment proceedings.
A
law department is as necessary to a properly organized business to-day as is
its credit department or its army of foreign buyers. The volume of business that passes through
its hands is proportioned to the volume of business of the house. Transactions
valued at millions of dollars in the year’s aggregate stand or fall on the
decisions that are called forth by: “Referred to the legal department.”
The
rise and development of the legal department as a recognized entity in the
conduct of a concern is a chapter in the history of the systematic
specialization of up-to-date business.
Time was when it sufficed a merchant or a manufacturer to consult a
general practitioner of the law for the cure of his legal troubles—a general
practitioner who, at the same time, served many merchants and manufacturers and
other individuals.
But
the times have changed. Now, instead of
the lawyer who serves the many clients, it is the one client served by the many
lawyers. And, by the same token, are the
lawyers no longer the general practitioners of old, but highly specialized
experts, each in one particular field relating to the needs of the concern by
which he is employed. Likewise are legal
fees passing out of the dealings of the commercial world. Nowadays a lawyer is on the pay-roll of a
company at the regular salary, working for his raise and promotion like each of
the other employees.
Continued.
Continued.
