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Dec 11, 2011

Small legal teams can have a big impact - AES corporate secretary

This year’s Corporate Governance Awards ceremony brought together top governance professionals across the country.

Whether it’s ethics, risk, technology or compliance, most legal professionals believe that this year companies have taken a slightly different approach to governance.

‘I keep the legal team small and we have specialties, but we still rely on each other,’ says Brian Miller, winner of the award for corporate governance professional of the year. As executive vice president, general counsel and corporate secretary of global power company AES Corporation, Miller says the biggest challenge is ensuring that employees in different countries are communicating with each other and are on the ‘same page.’

When it comes to ethics, companies should no longer adhere to the old policy of ‘tone at the top.’ Rather, better ethical leaders tend to focus on ‘tone at the middle,’ says Brian Martin, general counsel for KLA-Tencor. ‘It’s the actions of those in the middle that drive a company’s ethical culture,’ says Martin, who was nominated for the award for best overall governance, compliance and ethics program by a small or mid-cap company.

See below for interviews conducted by Corporate Secretary deputy editor Aarti Maharaj of award winners and nominees at this year’s Corporate Governance Awards.

Aarti Maharaj

Aarti is deputy editor at Corporate Secretary magazine