Barker Gilmore’s “The Reporting Structure of Legal, Compliance, Risk, and Privacy Leadership” benchmarks the reporting structure of GCs/CLOs and other leadership positions and ESG-related responsibilities based on a mid-2021 online survey.*
Among the key takeaways:
Of the relatively few companies without a GC/CLO (12%), nearly 80% were small companies (less than $500 million revenue). For the companies that have them, GCs/CLOs overwhelmingly report to the CEO. The relatively few GCs/CLOs that don’t report to the CEO report to the CAO or CFO and tend to be employed with private and/or smaller companies.
For those companies with Chief Compliance Officers (78%), that role most commonly reports to the GC/CLO (44%), followed by the CEO (42%).
While responsibility for ESG varies widely, it most often falls on the CLO/GC, as shown here:
The survey also benchmarked reporting structures for Chief Risk Officers and Chief Privacy Officers
* Survey respondents consisted of 206 predominantly GCs/CLOs and CCOs of public (49%), private (38%), and non-profit (14%) organizations, 54% of which had 1,000 or more employees, and 40% of which had 2020 revenues of at least $1 billion.
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This post first appeared in the weekly Society Alert!