Friday, June 2nd
Today I spent the day with the legal department at SAS. Interestingly, SAS has its own attorneys in-house, consisting of 45-60 employees. Their jobs range contract negotiations to dealing with international SAS subsidiaries. I got to shadow the latter team which included five team members.
One interesting thing I learned was that SAS has so many global offices, and that the relationships between SAS headquarters and these entities are controlled by legal. Each employee has a map in their room in order to pinpoint which countries they are responsible for. For example, one of the women were in charge of Latin American and the southeast and southwest countries in Europe. Today, she received requests from Brazil to have twelve different documents to follow their legal processes. Apparently, in most other countries outside the US, documents such as passport information and social security numbers are not seen as necessarily confidential which may cause legality concerns when SAS headquarters has to share that information to comply with the various international legal systems. I learned that there isn’t an actual definition for “international law” because law is so differentiated from country to country, making it impossible to always know how every process works.
One random fact about today: It was cake day! I really enjoyed the atmosphere of this department and how everyone got together in the afternoon in order to eat cake to celebrate June employee birthdays.
