Managers in federal executive branch agencies administer public programs and policies in a complex legal environment. To assist managers, each agency has an organization that is responsible for providing them legal advice, typically called an "Office of the General Counsel" (OGC). Existing literature from public administration and administrative law has addressed, to varying degrees, what OGC lawyers do or ought to do, but has primarily focused on providing legal advice, not obtaining it. This discrete literature is disconnected from major streams in public administration. The purpose of this study was to update and extend the literature by exploring managers' and lawyers' perceptions of the role of managers as advisees of OGC. This study made managers the focal point of exploration and used concepts from organizational role theory to clarify the term "role" and highlight the structural and interactional elements of the manager's part in the manager-lawyer relationship. Four research questions guided this study by inquiring about the expectations managers and lawyers have regarding: (1) the organizational arrangement for obtaining legal advice; (2) decision making in the context of obtaining legal advice; (3) the closeness of their working relationship; and (4) being a "client" of OGC in the context of obtaining legal advice. Data were collected from in-depth, semi-structured interviews conducted with 20 practitioners (14 managers; six lawyers). This study found that managers and lawyers preferred to remain separate from each other in the agency because of the expectation that managers obtain and lawyers provide objective legal advice. Regarding decision making, managers and lawyers expected managers to make decisions in the sense of seeking guidance from OGC rather than permission, being comfortable questioning legal advice, and choosing among options and alternatives; although, lawyers indicated some managers prefer not making decisions. The expectation of making decisions in the sense of choosing whether to follow legal advice remains contested among managers; among lawyers, they expect managers to consider legal advice and decide whether to follow it. Managers and lawyers expected to have a close working relationship marked by assistance with formulating legal questions and full disclosure of information. As for expectations associated with being a "client" of OGC, managers' and lawyers' expectations diverged on what being a "client" of OGC entails. Managers viewed themselves as clients, but associated the term "client" with customer service; lawyers, on the other hand, viewed managers as clients provided their interests are aligned with the agency's interests. Beyond exploring the role of managers when obtaining legal advice, this study's focus on the interaction between managers and lawyers within a federal agency suggests a way connecting public law more directly to public management, as well as extending insights from governance to activities inside an agency. / Ph. D.

Much has been written in the literature of higher education on the history and current role of presidents, provosts, and deans. However, higher education scholars have, for the most part ignored the role of institutional in-house attorneys on college and university campuses. Those who have written on the subject of institutional counsel have proffered the idea that in-house general counsel offices were established as a result of the increased regulation of higher education by state and federal governments, and litigation resulting from the faculty and student rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s. This project seeks to provide a detailed justification for the rationale for the proliferation of counsel offices, and to provide a base-line qualitative, interview-based approach to the current role of college and university attorneys. Using a historical, document based approach this dissertation provides a comprehensive exploration of the argument that the establishment and growth of offices of the general counsel on college and university campuses was rooted in litigation. This dissertation further builds on the notion that as colleges and universities became larger and more complex, federal and state governments increased regulatory and reporting demands and accountability on institutions. A second issue that this dissertation covers is the way in which modern day institutional counsel view their roles within a college or university. Using Oral History Methodology, three attorneys were interviewed about their perceptions of their roles. Based on those interviews, this dissertation proffers the idea that an institutional counsel’s view of his or her role is linked to the nature of the individual campus and its leadership, and the structure of the office in which the attorney works. This dissertation also puts the role of the institutional counsel into the context of institutional actors by comparing it with the role of the academic dean. In addition to showing that the role of the institutional counsel is institution dependent, the results of this project indicate that the role of the institutional general counsel is an area ripe for additional study.

The research problem for this study focused on organizations' inability to derive strategic value from the law due to the lack of integration between legal strategy and business strategy. The purpose of this study was to build consensus among in-house general counsel working across business industries in the United States with regard to techniques that will alter unreceptive managerial viewpoints toward the strategic value of law within the corporate setting. The research question centered on assessing the level of consensus among general counsel relative to those techniques. This 3-round qualitative Delphi study began with open-ended questions in Round 1 and progressed toward consensus in Round 3. The results encompass a consensus by the panel on 25 techniques for altering unreceptive managerial viewpoints toward the law spanning 5 categories: integrating legal considerations with business processes, improving workplace collaboration between in-house counsel and managers, leadership qualities and expectations of counsel, understanding legal implications of business decisions, and demonstration of strategic value. This was the first study to apply the construct of consensus to the generation of techniques by general counsel for altering unreceptive managerial viewpoints toward the strategic value of law. Incorporating the techniques identified in this study into the development of coaching practices, team building sessions, or other collaborative exercises may lead to positive social change through: (a) reduced anxiety stemming from organizational conflict between managers and in-house counsel; (b) decreased managerial burnout, absenteeism, and turnover due to organizational conflict with in-house counsel; and, (c) decreased workplace resistance between managers and in-house counsel.