(f) Severability of clauses. In the event that any provision of this Agreement is determined by a court of competent jurisdiction to be invalid, illegal or unenforceable, the validity, legality and enforceability of the remaining provisions shall not be affected or affected in any way. Legal secondments are still a practice of law firms. However, with the global rise of “new laws”/alternative legal service providers over the past 5-10 years, lawyers are able to work with law firms that offer you legal secondment options with full self-determination to select the type of legal work you do in which sector within a timeframe that suits you personally and professionally. In the case of statutory secondment, the law firm can decide whether the secondment service and possibilities take place via a work mandate or contract, depending on the structure. Our conclusion is not affected by the mere fact that, for example, the seconded lawyer (a) is expected to return to the firm at the end of the secondment, (b) retains the lawyer`s “class rank” in the firm, (c) retains the lawyer`s benefits under the firm`s pension plan, or (d) may send and receive emails through the firm`s email servers (but without access to confidants and secrets of the firm`s clients). [Ibid.] Melissa Green joined the American Medical Association (AMA) in November 2019 as Assistant General Counsel. In her role at AMA, Melissa supports the CPT and Masterfile licensing programs as well as the legal needs of the Professional Satisfaction and Practice Sustainability business unit. Prior to joining AMA, Melissa was Chief Legal Counsel and Chief Privacy Officer at The Chartis Group, a Chicago-based healthcare consulting and analytics firm, where she was responsible for business transactions for Chartis and its wholly-owned SaaS company, and was also HIPAA Compliance Officer as the organization`s Chief Privacy Officer. Melissa began her legal career in Cincinnati, Ohio with the law firm of Frost Brown Todd, where she was a partner in the healthcare transactions, securities and corporate relations department. In 2007, Melissa held her first internal consulting position at GE Aviation.
During her tenure at GE, she held numerous positions, including supporting new engine sales transactions for the Europe/Middle East/Africa region, the Electric Power business in Dayton, the Engine Services business (supporting the CF34 and CF6 engine lines) and compliance. After leaving GE, Melissa spent a brief stint at MedStar in Virginia before taking a full-time position at the University of Maryland Medical System in Baltimore, Maryland in July 2013. Originally from East Lansing, Michigan, Melissa received her bachelor`s degree from Michigan State University – James Madison College and graduated from the University of Michigan School of Law. Our firm, Perkins Coie, recognizes that the firm and our lawyers benefit from secondments and assists lawyers who wish to be seconded to a client. Dozens of Perkins Coie lawyers have completed secondments in recent years, including many to our firm`s major technology clients, such as Microsoft, Dropbox and Facebook. Some lawyers have enjoyed their secondment so much that they have made several secondments to the same or different clients. One lawyer who worked with Dropbox described the assignment as a “pivotal experience” in her early years at the firm: not only was the experience valuable to her professional development, but she was proud that Perkins Coie`s partners trusted her enough to recommend her for the engagement. While the pandemic made her publication a distant experience, it was still a resounding success that helped her better understand her clients` needs and culture. Thanks to her secondment, she now has a better understanding of who needs to be involved in decision-making in the company and what steps need to be taken to achieve the best results.
An assignment not only benefits the lawyer, but also helps the client. Lean internal teams can struggle to cope with unexpected work spikes. In an extraordinarily busy time, the organization`s secondment provides valuable support from an experienced lawyer who knows their job well and can provide immediate assistance. And since displays are billed to the customer as a flat fee, the customer receives this help without having to worry about hourly costs charged. Once the engagement is completed, the client continues to enjoy the benefits of secondment to a law firm advisor who is familiar with their legal issues and business processes. As one lawyer told us, after his secondment, he had a better understanding of how his legal advice would affect his client`s affairs and was therefore a better and more effective advisor to his client. Lawyers with a history of posting agreements work with clients to assist them. Do you need help with a secondment contract? The Committee then considered another practical issue raised by many delegations. Can the firm continue to supervise the work of the seconded lawyer for matters relating to the hosting organisation? In other words, if the lawyer was part of a litigation team defending the receiving organisation prior to the secondment, could the firm continue to monitor that lawyer`s work on the same issue during the secondment? The Committee concluded that there was no reason to assign conflicts in these circumstances for two reasons.
First, the law firm and the host organisation had previously worked together on this issue, and nothing about the fact that the firm remained involved in the lawyer`s work on the same issue during the secondment raised any new or different conflicts. Moreover, there is hardly any functional difference between the activity of the lawyer seconded as in-house legal adviser in charge of the case and the supervision of the work of the Registry and the supervision of the work of the lawyer seconded by the Registry in the same case. Reaching a different conclusion, the committee wrote, “would place form above substance and create an unjustified gap between the host organization, on the one hand, and the seconded lawyer and law firm, on the other, thereby undermining the host organization`s right to obtain advice of its choice.” [NYC Bar 2007-2, citing Levine v. Levine, 56 N.Y.2d 42 (1982).] As a further example, the committee stated that if the seconded lawyer is still associated with the firm, conflicts between the law firm and the host organization would be assigned from one to the other. NYC Bar 2007-2 [cited NYSBA Op. 793 (2006)]. Although, without derogation, the Registrar would not normally have been able to behave unfavourably towards the Host Organization even prior to secondment because of the allocation under RD 5-105, no lawyer from the Host Organization would be able to take on matters prejudicial to another client of the firm if the seconded lawyer is still linked to the firm. This would undoubtedly be a problem that the legal department of the host organisation does not want to have.