A CAREER THAT MAKES A DIFFERENCE

COLLEEN DORSEY, ESQ. UNIVERSITY OF ST THOMAS SCHOOL OF LAW

How many of you want to be in a profession where you actually make a difference? I know it’s always what I envisioned for myself personally.  My journey started as an attorney for Land O’Lakes doing transactional work and ultimately antitrust work.  I morphed into the compliance and ethics role as so many of the current professionals today have done.  What I didn’t know then but know now is I am meant to do a lot more for this profession.  And “by this profession” I am talking about the profession of ethics and compliance.

How many of you have a firm grasp of what it means to be an ethics and compliance professional? Don’t feel bad if you have no idea what I’m talking about – I didn’t know when I entered this profession either but what I have come to know and to fully appreciate is how meaningful this profession is and how powerful an impact it can and does make on society as a whole.

I have used the following analogy to explain the compliance and ethics function.  It is not my brainchild but that of the newly appointed Compliance Counsel hired by the DOJ Fraud Division, Hui Chen. It involves thinking of a compliance and ethics professional like you would the engineer of a car.  When engineering a car, you create a control panel that tells you if the gas is low, if the engine needs to be serviced or if the tire pressure is low. The engineer also puts additional safety features in place like seat belts and air bags. All of these controls are put into place to help ensure that the driver stays safe and out of trouble. 

That is what a compliance and ethics professional does – he or she creates controls that help the company identify problem areas and risks and processes that might help the company better detect problems and stay out of trouble. In that sense, compliance professionals, like engineers, are charged with creating programs that keep the company safe from harm. But…we all know that you can create the safest car on the road but how that car is driven by the driver is going to be critical.  So in order to be thorough in your approach to safety, you also have to look at driver behavior: Is the particular driver involved likely to maintain the car on schedule? Is the driver likely to pay attention to warning signs? Is the driver likely to drive drunk or otherwise cross the line?

In this way, the engineer of a car is not only responsible for creating a control panel that will help keep the driver safe, they also have to consider driver behavior. Because, again, we all know that you can have the safest car on the road but if the driver is drunk it won’t matter what the control panel was engineered to protect against.  The driver’s behavior has jeopardized his ability to see the warning signs that the control panel was meant to protect against.

As an ethics and compliance professional, your job is to not only create the controls, processes and procedures to help detect issues, but also to help shape the attitudes of the drivers (or the leadership) to help ensure they don’t make bad judgements.

This is where the ethics part of compliance and ethics come in. Ethics is a critical component of an effective compliance and ethics program.  Understanding the rules, regulations and laws particular to a specific industry is great.  But what really makes a difference and sets a good compliance professional apart from a great one is one that understands how to impart the importance of ethics to the employees and leadership of the company. 

Those professionals will stand out from the crowd.

Back to our car engineer analogy - St. Thomas’ program approaches the compliance and ethics profession like that of the car engineer analogy. We provide students the education not only to know how to create the control panel and all of the other safety features but also how to shape the behavior of the drivers. 

We have two degree programs – an MSL for non-lawyers and an LLM for those that are receiving or have already, their law degree. We have a core required curriculum consisting of 4 courses:

• legal reasoning
• compliance programming design, operation and performance
• ethical culture and
• executive perspectives on ethics and compliance

Elective courses vary from a wide range of law and business courses including those that lend themselves to a more specialized focus such as Health Law, Banking Law as well as those that address the soft skills required of a compliance and ethics professional like Management Priorities and Communication. Courses are taught by a mix of full time law and business faculty as well as leading compliance professionals.

Join us as we continue to build on an amazing profession and help us shape corporate behavior into the future. You may contact me at any time and I will do my best to answer any questions you may have regarding this field.  My direct line is 651-962-4864.  You can also follow my on Twitter @USTCompliance or review our program online at www.stthomas.edu.