Compliance is a hot business law topic in and outside of the industry.  JD as compliance officers is a very likely future as law schools respond to hiring market pressures and what corporate employers' need.  So what does this mean in terms of curriculum and in a future practice?  A handful of law schools now offer courses focusing on compliance (see this Harvard Forum on Corporate Goverance and Financial Regulation Post from May 2014).  Professors like Jenifer Arlen as the Director of the Program on Corporate Compliance and Enforcement at NYU and Mike Koehler, at Southern Illinois University School of Law with his FCPA Professor Blog, are certainly pioneers in the emerging field.  At my law school–Georgia State University in Atlanta, GA–we are wondering how best to utilize the industry resources in our backyard.  I am a new board member of a compliance-focused round table that draws membership from our fortune 500 corporate neighbors . With these questions at the forefront of my mind, I found today's article on the FCPA Blog (an industry-focused resource) titled, Memo to law schools: The world needs compliance officers to be particularly interesting. In this post, law schools are encourged to:

Teach [students] the hallmarks of an effective compliance program and how board and management oversight are supposed to work. Teach them how to train employees. How to identify and assess the risks of intermediaries and how due diligence is done. Teach them about feedback loops, internal reporting, and whistleblower laws and programs….But aside from a few isolated examples, the concept of training students to be compliance officers hasn't taken root in the law schools' curricula. 

Do any of you have good examples from your law school or practice about the role of lawyers in corporate compliance positions?

-Anne Tucker