The Corporate Counsel section of The Jacksonville Bar Association is geared toward attorneys who function exclusively as in-house counsel for private or public companies or organizations. Tracy Arthur of Rayonier is chairing the section this year.
“Our main objective is to assist in-house counsel in order to make their jobs easier, to give them a network to discuss issues and to bring in CLE speakers,” said Arthur. “The idea is to look at shared areas of interest.”
With the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act to lessen the occurrence of creative accounting, new laws are keeping in-house lawyers busy. As a result, assembling all the members has been a challenge.
“There have been a lot of corporate initiatives, legislation and other things that came out of the Enron/Arthur Andersen mess,” she said. “Corporate counsel addresses these issues to comply with new regulations, so everybody’s been quite busy. I have a sense that they have gotten up to speed pretty quickly since a lot of it went into effect at varying dates last year. So, a lot of continuing education has been on-the-job training.”