Joe Murphy (jemurphy5730@gmail.com) is a Senior Advisor at Compliance Strategists, SCCE’s Director of Public Policy, and Editor-in-Chief of CEP Magazine.

We still hear this question: Should compliance & ethics (C&E) be part of legal or siloed/divorced/separated? What may follow is a list of “horribles” of this gulf and the reasons why the two should, therefore, be combined.

But this is a false dichotomy. C&E is a multidisciplinary field. It is not law, but it is also not human resources, security, audit, or any other one field. It does, however, need to work with each of those fields. Being a lawyer is a qualification for providing legal advice but not for most of the core elements of compliance work.