[anigbrowl]

"How far can we push the envelope toward being illegal, but still remain within legal boundaries?"

This would be better phrased as 'how far can we go in pursuit of our employer's legitimate interests, but still remain within legal boundaries.' As phrased, you're treating illegality as a goal in itself, but this isn't the case. All companies have interests, but the most obvious and efficient means of pursuing those interests may be odds with any of the many regulations governing corporate activity. Compliance departments specialize in making sure firms stay on the right side of that line, and in a complex economy with complex regulatory regimes that's a full time job.

As far as naming choices go, 'compliance' is the standard term in industry for ensuring that a firm's behavior is lawful, and it doesn't carry any connotation of pushing boundaries or circumventing the law. There's no 'newspeak' here except in your own mind, unless you actually believe that companies aspire to illegal behavior as a matter of course.

[rbanffy]

Companies like Microsoft leave the legality of their actions to the compliance team. They have interest in pursuing both legal and illegal actions and their compliance department has the task of ensuring even the illegal stuff can be bent into comformance to the letter of the law. It's not aspiring to illegal behavior for the illegality of it. It's only that the closer you get to the edge, the more advantages you squeeze out of the situation.

[bennyg]

I think you're pursuing a fantastical notion here. It's more like, "hey we can get a great business deal and corner a market by doing this, this and this - legal team: are we doing anything wrong here?" They aren't cackling in a corner somewhere thinking about opportunities to toe the line. They're legitimately trying to beat the competition and some of those ways might potentially be illegal, so they need to get the okay or not before fucking up publicly and majorly.

[rbanffy]

More than once I witnessed questions to the effect of "how far can we go before we break the law" be asked. The person who asked had full knowledge his/her plans were illegal. He/She just needed to know where to stop.

[hueving]

This statement is completely nonsensical. If the person had full knowledge that the plans were illegal, why would he/she ask how far they can go before breaking the law? He/she clearly didn't know where the boundaries were.

[001sky]

Huh? A person can have a plan to go from 0-100 miles an hour and ask where the speedlimit is. Stories similar in a business environment are reasonably normal. "Compliance" is strictly a legal CYA department (as is anything relating to HR or "Ethics", btw.)

[itsdrewmiller]

Why is he/she asking if he/she already knows it is illegal? And also why doesn't he/she know his/her own sex?

[shaneofalltrad]

This conversation between you and you is getting complicated. Maybe he/she (the parent post of my parent post) has credible information about he/she and does not want to expose the he/she's company or who he/she is referencing. I am a he, in case you would like to refer to me in your response. Please let me know your sex too.

[user24]

> He/She just needed to know where to stop.

Well, that's a good thing right? You're pretty much saying "I knew this person once who wanted to do something, knew it was illegal and so scaled back their plans to fit within the law. What a scumbag."

[tripzilch]

> "hey we can get a great business deal and corner a market by doing this, this and this - legal team: are we doing anything wrong here?"

Wrong question.

Should be: "are we doing anything illegal here?".

Just because it's legal doesn't mean it's right. That's the whole point here.

If you have a Office of Legal Compliance whose job is strictly to decide whether something is within the law or not, a corporation might easily get the idea they can get away with doing all sorts of wrongs.

Is it legal? Possibly, apparently. But should you nose through somebody's private email without their consent? Is that ever the right thing to do? I'm gonna say no, almost always. There may be a few exceptions in some specific circumstances, but that is not for the Office of Legal Compliance to determine because ethics isn't their job.

(it might be nice if it was, but it's not)

[sqrt17]

To be honest: Some enterprises can operate fully within the law without ever experiencing a conflict of interest (example: you sew clothes, and sell them). Some enterprises operate completely without regard of the law (example: drug smuggling, extortion, slave trade), and correspondingly have to hide a very large part of their operations from law enforcement. A third category of enterprises has goals that are at least partly in conflict with the goals of laws and regulations. This obviously happens very frequently when said laws and regulations are set up for the protection of employees, farm animals, the environment, customers, market entrants, etc. in their respective role, versus employers in general, mass-production of animal products, exploitation of natural resources, selling of legal stimulants such as alcohol and tobacco. This third kind of company usually only hide part of their operations from law enforcement or the public, because their business model is compatible with compatible goals, but they are often seen (i) suppressing information about certain parts of their business, (ii) practicing aggressive lobbying and (iii) relying heavily on legal counsel in order to stay within the law while pursuing their business activities. Basic economic sense tells you that retaining lobbyists and legal counsel costs money, hence organizations that don't need it would never spend money on either. "Complex regulatory regimes" usually don't happen by themselves, but because the people making laws are driven (by private or public interests) to assume that it is necessary to influence what companies and individuals do.