About

Mark M. McMillin is the general counsel for National Airlines, a major aviation firm which is primarily a US military contractor. He began his career after being admitted to the New York Bar in the pharmaceutical industry, and got a taste for the in-house legal realm when acting as a general counsel for a German pharmaceutical company early in his career. His aviation and public corporation experience began in 2003 at World Airways and he became the general counsel of a publicly-traded company in 2005, successfully closing on multiple international transactions while cleaning up the company’s litigation, and having a key role in helping the team build the company into a Fortune 1000 company. McMillan then joined National Airlines, a privately held company, and has quickly with a new management team set to work tightening financial and legal controls to mitigate risk and create individual accountability going forward. He identifies that, ‘the reduction to the military’s budget over the years and the wind down of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have forced us to rethink our business model and to expand into the niche commercial markets’. McMillan is a highly skilled in-house lawyer adept at meeting the strenuous demands of business with legal reality and creating opportunity. He highlights that management is under ‘often enormous pressure to produce results, to increase profits. Sometimes they will approach their general counsel with some novel or unconventional scheme to further that end which could trigger some regulatory issue. A good general counsel will try to find a solution to a problem rather than always look at things as black or white, but he or she can never be pressured into doing the wrong thing. The general counsel is the moral compass of any organisation and can never comprise on integrity or ethics and must have the fortitude to say “no” to the boss’.