Vice President, General Counsel, Secretary & Compliance Officer Lois Bingham Honored by Crain’s Detroit Business 2015 General & In-House Counsel Awards
May 27, 2015

Crain’s sited Lois’ accomplishments Instituting a regional legal strategy for the North and Central American operations of Yazaki, including creating a legal department in Mexico and reducing the use of outside counsel. The moves resulted in a 19 percent decline in overall legal spending and a 58 percent reduction in spending on outside counsel.

As she set out to create an appropriate department for its growing base in the region, her first move was to conduct an internal assessment of the company's legal assets and redefine the scope of the department. At the time, Bingham's department contained one other attorney and a paralegal, along with mounting legal work from increasing operations in Mexico and Central America.

"I really needed to figure out if my new department was structured to meet our needs, which it was not," Bingham said. "The organization was restructuring to take on more of a regional operation, and while we could have limped along just handling the U.S. matters, we couldn't handle the overall regional structure."

Bingham opened a legal office in Mexico, which accounts for most of Yazaki's manufacturing operations in North America, and added specialized in-house attorneys to handle the day-to-day operational needs of the supplier.

Bringing more of the work in-house cut Yazaki North America's spending on outside counsel, which was reduced 58 percent in the 2014 fiscal year from 2013.