More on CCOs and Law Degrees

My phone rang the other day. At the other end of the line was a source who had to remain anonymous. Why? “Because I’m a compliance officer with a law degree, calling to explain why it’s so useful to have a law degree,” he said. “If my name gets out, the compliance officers without law degrees will never let me hear the end of it.”

Oh dear. We’re back on this debate again.

For those who haven’t heard, this blog has run a series of posts over the last few months about whether chief compliance officers need JD degrees for career success. Lots of people say that from a practical, what you do every day perspective — no, having a JD isn’t a necessary ingredient to excel at the job. Then again, compliance officers who have JDs do tend to make more money, so clearly the corporate powers that be do reward you for having one. That’s the tension I’ve been trying to unpack into its component parts.

Anyway, back to my friend with the law degree. The real question, he said, isn’t whether you have a law degree. It’s the kind of lawyer you are. 

“It’s incredibly helpful to be a lawyer if you’re the right lawyer,” he said. “But it’s a different thing to say it’s helpful to be a lawyer, than it’s helpful if you have a JD.” 

For example, one specific benefit from having a JD, he continued, is that law school trains lawyers to write clearly and concisely. “That doesn’t mean that people who don’t have a JD can’t write clearly too, but everyone who goes through law school does know how to get to the point.”

That is a very fair point to raise. So much of a chief compliance officer’s job is either (a) walking senior management through complex investigation matters, with multiple competing interests to consider; or (b) exhorting the larger workforce to follow rules and ethical values because that is “the right thing to do.” In both cases, an ability to communicate clearly, concisely, and effectively can be invaluable. 

OK, that’s 10 points for Team JD. My friend kept going.

Lawyer Experience as Driver of Trust

You also need to consider the work experience a lawyer can bring to the compliance officer role, my friend said. He spent a few years as a prosecutor, then as a trial lawyer, and eventually landed at the corporate legal team of a Fortune 500 company. That led to years working on legal matters with various parts of the enterprise before moving into a senior-level ethics and compliance role. (Which happened after the company had a misconduct issue large enough to make national news.) 

That experience handling corporate legal matters can be invaluable for compliance officers in two ways, my friend said. 

First, your understanding of the legal team’s perspective gives you more credibility to push back on the legal team when it staked out an unreasonable position on some issue.

For example, you and the HR team might resolve some personnel misconduct issue, and want to circulate an anonymized account of lessons learned in the employee newsletter. Legal might try to veto that idea, claiming that someone out there might recognize the story and file a lawsuit. A CCO with experience as a lawyer could push back against legal more effectively, because he or she will know that the odds of such a lawsuit are small, and usually die at the motion to dismiss. 

“I can’t tell you how many times HR called me and said, ‘We want you in this meeting so you can call bullsh—t on the lawyers’,” my friend said. “Happened all the time.” 

Second, if you’ve counseled business units on legal questions in the past, they’re more likely to heed your advice on ethics issues now.

That is, if you’ve already worked with business units on issues that matter to them — and let’s face it, the issues that matter to them are how to hit performance goals and avoid lawsuits or legal violations — that builds the foundation of trust that will be necessary when you ask them to do something hard around ethics.

“When you’ve already advised them on legal issues and saved them money by avoiding a mistake, that’s an incredible benefit when you come back to advise them on ethics and ask them to do something hard,” my friend said. “They’re more likely to accept that ethical matters are important business matters too. There are other ways to get that allegiance and experience, but not a lot.” 

You gotta admit, that’s 10 more points for Team JD.

But It’s Complicated…

None of this is to say that compliance officers with law degrees are inherently better. “I’m absolutely not saying we’re better!” my friend stressed. “I’m only saying we bring something to the table that does have value.” 

That’s fair. My friend also agreed that non-lawyer CCOs can bring many of the same skills mentioned above (clear writing, an understanding of corporate legal’s perspective, trust with the business units) to the table too. He has met numerous compliance officers with lawyer experience who were terrible at their jobs, and numerous compliance officers without lawyer experience who were great at theirs. So have I.

Plus, most of my friend’s observations are about how compliance officers interact with other parts of the business. The work of running the compliance department itself, independent of those interactions, depends on expertise in policy management, due diligence, risk assessment, training, data management, and investigations. Only that last item is taught in law schools. All the rest isn’t. So there are plenty of ways for non-lawyer CCOs to be great at the role.

The challenge for non-lawyer CCOs is how to convey that message about your experience. It’s not an insurmountable task if you’re working with recruiters and HR teams who can grasp such nuance — but in the screwy world of automated recruitment that exists today, I’m not sure how often that happens. 

Plenty of compliance officer job descriptions require a JD simply to winnow down thousands applicants to, say, a more manageable 300, which still isn’t really manageable at all for the human recruiter; but the process also winnows out tons of compliance officers with great experience but not a JD. I don’t know what the answer to this dysfunction is, but the dysfunction is real and nobody benefits from it.

Shameless Plug of Self-Promotion

If you’ve read this far and are just as flummoxed about compliance officer career development as everyone else, Radical Compliance and recruitment firm BarkerGilmore are hosting a special webinar on Wednesday, April 16, from 1 to 2:30 p.m. ET to talk about all these issues and more. 

We expect the conversation to be robust, and we’d love to have you. Please register and bring all your advice, frustrations, and observations about the compliance officer job market these days; we want to discuss them all!