In-House Attorneys for Major Companies Discuss Outside Counsel, Advice to Policymakers

During Georgetown University Law Center’s Annual Trade Update, a panel of in-house attorneys for major corporations including Tesla, Microsoft and Home Depot, discussed the particular challenges they face in an international trade market that is only growing more complex.

They particularly talked about their relationships with outside counsel, including what they look for in such firms and how they utilize them in the course of their own responsibilities.

All of the speakers on the panel, titled “International Trade Was Supposed to Get Easier: How In-House Counsel Deal With Increasing Complexity,” agreed that they generally hadn’t expected trade law to get much easier and hadn’t seen it do so.

Joel Rogers, associate general counsel for Home Depot, said that with all of the new tariff provisions starting in 2016, knowledge about rules of origin and classification issues have become much more critical. As a result, he said, his company has become more active lobbying on the Hill to ensure representatives understand the tariffs’ impacts. It also has sought out more help from outside counsel with understanding of specific issues, he said.

Time sensitivity is a particular issue because of that, said Miriam Eqab, associate general counsel for Tesla. She said she often needs an answer very quickly that she can only get from outside counsel.

That counsel also may not know the ins and outs of the particular business, said Sarah O’Neal, general counsel for Microsoft. As a result, they may struggle more to apply their interpretation of a particular statute to the company, she said. She and Eqab said they look for outside counsel that already has some knowledge of their businesses, Eqab adding that they like being approached by an attorney who owns Tesla.

And Neal Grealy, group head of litigation for Louis Dreyfus Company, agreed as well, noting that strategic considerations -- where inputs are coming from, what other trade cases might impact the company -- have become more vital for both in-house and outside counsel.

The panel’s moderator, Gregory Spak of White & Case, also asked the lawyers how they would advise a policymaker regarding their field.

Eqab said the most important thing a policymaker can do is listen to their industries.

“A lot of the time these regulations come out, and they just don’t make sense to someone who’s actually in the industry,” she said. “And so we’re reading them and we’re trying to interpret them, we're trying to see how it impacts us, but it’s clear that someone didn’t necessarily do their homework.”

And if industries are still sourcing products from China despite having to pay a 25% tariff, “that’s saying something,” Rogers said. He said it means that there are no other places from which to source those products and agreed with comments in an earlier panel, a legislative roundtable, that it would be good to consider a new exemption process with regard to those tariffs.