Tag: Certifications

Compliance Lawyers and Legal Education

I had an interesting discussion on the possible role of law schools in helping train law students for jobs in the compliance field. Compliance does not require a law degree, but there seems to be a demand for compliance professionals with legal degrees in the mid and higher levels, particularly in highly regulated industries.

legal education law school

Part of the discussion was about compliance as a distinct discipline. There seemed to be little disagreement about. There were differing viewpoints about the nature of discipline and the profession. That seems normal because there are differing requirements depending on the field and the role within a particular organization.

Can law students be taught compliance? The answer, in part, depends on an approach to teaching the law.

When I was a law student, the basic approach was case law. We studied appellate case decisions. These were instances where something went wrong, someone was angry enough to bring a case, fought it out in court and then appealed the decision. To me, that seems the opposite of compliance. That teaches you how to deal with a situation and argue the positions after the bad thing happened. Compliance is about preventing the bad thing from happening.

Several people mentioned that they had gotten letters to supplement their compliance credentials. I got my IACCP®. Others mentioned CCEP and other credentialed designations.

There is a demand for something beyond or different than a legal degree to grow a compliance professional. There is a potential role there for law schools.  I know that Seton Hall has certification programs in compliance for healthcare.

I also note that several law school are involved with the Compliance Certification Board Accrediting Program:

 Charlotte School of Law, Charlotte, NC

 Cleveland Marshall College of Law, Cleveland, OH

 Cumberland School of Law – Samford University, Birmingham, AL

 DePaul University College of Law, Chicago, IL

 George Washington University, Washington DC

 Mitchell Hamline School of Law, St. Paul, MN

 Widener University Delaware Law School, Wilmington, DE

I would guess that more law schools are looking at compliance as way to add value to the legal education. The classic role of placing graduating law students into the big law firms is a shrinking market. I heard that one law school has gone from placing 70% of its graduates into the biggest law firms to only 30%, while at the same time shrinking class size and maintaining its rankings.

UC Irvine Law School
By Mathieu Marquer
CC BY SA

Does it Matter Where the Signature Is?

Just about every compliance certification has the employee sign at the bottom. We have been signing letters and contracts at the end for millenia.

But maybe there is a way to increase ethical performance by moving that signature to the top.

Lisa L. Shu, Nina Mazar, Francesca Gino, Dan Ariely, and Max H. Bazerman recently published a paper that found differences in compliance/ethical performance depending on whether the participant signed first or at the end.

In one experiment, the subjects took a test and scored it themselves. They would be paid based on their performance and reimbursed for their expenses incurred in attending the test. After self-scoring the test they went into another room to self report their income on a tax form. There were three forms:

  • One with a certification at the beginning that all information is true
  • A second with the same certification, but at the end
  • A third with no certification

The test and reporting was set up to be very easy to cheat, with a simple and immediate cash reward for cheating. You should not be surprised that cheating was rampant.

With the third form, with no certification, cheating occurred 64% of the time. With the certification at the bottom, the cheating actually rose to 79%. The winner, with the certification at the beginning, only had a 37% cheat rate.

Moving the certification to the beginning had a dramatic, positive effect on reducing cheating.

The paper includes several other similar experiments with the same results. A slightly different test involved word puzzles. Those that signed an honesty pledge before engaging in the cheating experiment ended up solving more of the ethics-related words than the others.

The authors theorize that the certification at the top pre-sets the person to start thinking more ethically. If they don’t hit the certification until the end, they have already supplied the information with whatever ethical slant they may have.

I’m going to re-think how I design my certification. At the top will be a certification that all of the information is true and correct, before they start filling in the information.

Sources: