To accomplish this task, legal professionals must become engaged in the mechanisms of internal controls, ensure that they receive prompt, comprehensive information from management, and have adequate access to the appropriate level of management and the board to be able to offer useful and timely counsel.
The role of legal professionals In many recent cases, including the fact patterns I described a little earlier, companies did not take adequate steps to prevent the problem behavior in the first instance, and the companies' accountants, auditors and counsel were not asked to assist, were not able to assist, or were simply not actively engaged in foreseeing, identifying or addressing problems as they developed.