|
 BERT
CORNELISON
HALLIBURTON
 A
SENSE OF BALANCE
For more and more executives, globalization is a fact of life—but as general counsel at Halliburton, the international energy company,
Bert Cornelison Jr. has probably had more experience with it than most. Here, Cornelison discusses the legal and business challenges of doing business worldwide and offers some insights into how companies and executives can contend with it.
“There was a time when things could wait until tomorrow. Now it’s always tomorrow somewhere, and things won’t wait.”
How has globalization
changed day-to-day life for you?
Globalization makes things more complicated, and in
my area it has increased complexity in a couple of
ways. One, we simply have more lawyers in more
jurisdictions. Halliburton operates in about 70
countries, and in each country, we’re basically
operating under two legal regimes at once—the local
laws and U.S. laws, because we are a U.S. company.
Second, there’s increasing regulation, especially
with Sarbanes-Oxley and all the compliance
procedures we have to go through across the company
worldwide.
How do you balance things
across that complicated patchwork?
For U.S. multinationals, the makeup of the law
department used to be fairly U.S.- centric. Now, we
tend to have what we refer to as a nationalized
workforce, which means we try to have people local
to the area that we operate in. That way, we have
lawyers who know their own work environments, their
own laws and the nuances of local customs. But we
also have to make sure that we instill in them an
appreciation of the U.S. regulatory structure. So we
communicate a lot— everyone is connected via
computer. We also bring all our lawyers from around
the world to the U.S. on a regular basis for
symposia on the latest global and U.S. legal issues.
And we send lawyers from the U.S. overseas to
conduct training sessions for our people in various
aspects of U.S. law, such as antitrust and FCPA
[Foreign Corrupt Practices Act] issues. So you have
to work actively to balance the global and local
perspectives.
How has globalization
affected the way you work with the business side?
Speed and complexity have increased, so today, our
legal department is highly decentralized. Most of my
lawyers are out with business groups, where they can
provide immediate feedback. For example, we put our
intellectual property lawyers right with our
inventors, where they participate in brainstorming
sessions about new products. The lawyers can help
the inventors fine-tune their ideas to make the
patent more valuable. This helps make sure the
innovation has the strongest possible legal
protection and is useful to the business, and it
saves time. In a global business, time-to-market is
key.
What can business
executives do to make the best use of the legal team
in this environment?
The business folks need to get their issues to the
legal team as early as they can. Things work out
most efficiently, most cost-effectively, and with
the least disruption when you get legal input as
early as possible. To some extent, Sarbanes-Oxley
has helped here because companies have become
accustomed to having issues vetted early on for
compliance. For their part, law departments need to
make sure they are being proactive and getting
feedback to the business in a timely fashion.
You mentioned balancing
global and local considerations? How about work-life
balance?
That’s a real issue for executives in a global
company because there is a temptation to stay
plugged in on a continual basis. It could be 11 at
night and you get a BlackBerry message from Jakarta
with a problem. That is a temptation you have to
fight— but I can’t hold myself out as a standard in
this regard. I would usually decide that if I
respond, I’ll lose 30 minutes of sleep. But if I
don’t, they’ll have eight hours of lost time. So it
can be difficult to draw those lines. There was a
time when things could usually wait until tomorrow.
Now it’s always tomorrow somewhere, and things won’t
wait. CT |
