President Susan Hockfield today announced plans to create a General Counsel's Office to provide MIT with coordinated legal advice and counsel.
"The increasing complexity of the Institute's activities and of the legal domain in which they take place have increased the amount of legal activity and the demand for coherence of legal advice across the Institute," Hockfield wrote in her e-mailed announcement to the community.
The new office will provide the Institute with a central point of contact and access for a wide range of legal services. Legal counsel is currently provided by a number of offices on campus, including the Senior Counsel's Office and the Office of Intellectual Property Counsel.
An advisory committee appointed by the president will work to draw up the specific functions of the new General Counsel's Office. This group will also assist in the search for the Institute's new general counsel.
MIT community members who wish to offer ideas, suggestions and perspectives about the new General Counsel's Office may send letters confidentially either to the Office of the President, Room 3-208, or via e-mail to generalcounselsearch@mit.edu.
Community members may also contact individual members of the committee:
�����Committee co-chair James A. Champy, member of the MIT Corporation, james.champy@ps.net
�����Committee co-chair Ann J. Wolpert, director of libraries, awolpert@mit.edu
�����Professor Lotte Bailyn, MIT Sloan School of Management, lbailyn@mit.edu
�����Donner Professor of Science Marc A. Kastner, Department of Physics, mkastner@mit.edu
�����Julius A. Stratton Professor Jeffrey H. Shapiro, director of the Research Laboratory of Electronics, jhs@mit.edu
�����Susan Whitehead, member of the MIT Corporation, whitehead@sewhitehead.com
