by Lillian Yob

On January 15, MSJDN’s President-Elect Eleanor Magers Vuono and I met with the Association of Corporate Counsel’s Amar Sarwal, Vice-President and Chief Legal Strategist, to talk about areas where our organizations share interests and opportunities may exist for collaboration. The meeting highlighted a number of positive opportunities for MSJDN to learn from ACC and for ACC to gain more information about MSJDN and how we support the military community.

The Association of Corporate Counsel is a bar association that represents the interests of its 35,000+ in-house counsel members in the United States and around the world. ACC serves the needs of its corporate counsel members in a number of ways, including research and surveys, leadership and professional development opportunities and support of diversity and pro bono initiatives. One of the principal activities of the Association of Corporate Counsel is advocacy on public policy matters affecting corporate counsel. These advocacy activities include right to practice issues, on which ACC has voiced support for accommodation before judiciary, regulatory and state licensing bodies. ACC also hosts the In-house Jobline, a platform containing hundreds of job openings in corporate legal departments.

Our meeting highlighted a number of common ground areas between our organizations, including our network’s commitment to continue pushing to eliminate barriers to licensing accommodations, facilitate job placement and promote our pro bono initiative for military JD spouses. This first meeting outlined several important ways that MSJDN and ACC can work together in the near future to advocate for our members around mutual objectives, including:

An ACC sponsored webinar for its general counsel members to introduce the Military Spouse JD Network and its advocacy and pro bono project and discuss ways that ACC members can support the military community through military spouse hiring and potential sponsorship of MSJDN initiatives;

Pro bono collaboration support through ACC’s national partnership with the Pro Bono Institute;

Newsletter/blog posts to ACC’s online community publications to highlight our areas of mutual interest.

Following this highly positive meeting, we are encouraged about the prospects for long-term collaboration and support between ACC, the global bar association for in-house counsel, and MSJDN.