The recent move by the Massachusetts Pension Reserves Investment Management Board (MassPRIM) to reduce their exposure to fund of hedge funds and initiate a direct hedge fund investment program highlights the trend by institutional investors to bypass fund of funds for direct hedge fund investments. In addition to MassPRIM, the $23 billion Employees Retirement System of Texas, the $76 billion Ohio Public Employees Retirement System and the $2.5 billion Texas Permanent School Fund have all begun to lay the groundwork for direct investment programs as well. The charts below illustrate the trend towards direct hedge fund placements:

In my role as Product Marketing VP of the Global Legal Segment for IntraLinks, I just completed an international speaking tour to engage General Counsel around the world about their most pressing needs. The goal was to have a conversation about how IntraLinks for Corporate Legal Management can provide solutions for those needs.

It truly was a global tour over the past month. I participated on a panel on technology solutions at the ACC Europe annual conference in Berlin, where I had the opportunity to share perspectives with in-house counsel from across Europe over the course of three days. IntraLinks led a panel at the ALM Corporate Counsel event in New York City, where I served as moderator and heard the viewpoints from General Counsel in the United States. And IntraLinks hosted a dinner event at the Savoy Hotel in London for a thought leadership discussion on risk readiness with senior corporate counsel based in the United Kingdom.

“It is easy to be brave when far away from danger” – Aesop.

The above quote is an apt description of Corporate Development and CFO behavior over the past few years due to many companies choosing to accumulate cash on their balance sheets rather than deploy it for acquisitions. However, this is not to diminish the importance of taking a cautious approach in turbulent times as the aforementioned storyteller also sagely noted “It is thrifty to prepare today for the wants of tomorrow”.

If you put four lawyers in a room, you may be surprised how animated the conversation can get when they start talking about risk. We recently hosted our first webcast dedicated to IntraLinks for Corporate Legal Management. The webcast focused on “Risk Readiness and Information Security in Today’s World” and was moderated by Michael Asen, VP, product marketing, global legal and compliance segment at IntraLinks. He was joined by Dave Curran, EVP, Business and Legal affairs, IntraLinks, who chaired the panel; Juliette Pryor, EVP, GC and chief ethics officer, U.S. Foodservice; Susan Portin, president, IMPACT Management Solutions, Inc. and affiliated with Celerant Consulting, Inc. Over 150 people registered for the webcast, representing the legal departments of corporations ranging from Fortune 500 companies to mid- to small-sized enterprises.

Cloud has been the buzzword for some time in technology. I’m delighted to have recently joined IntraLinks, which has been leading the charge since the beginning. That’s why it was great to see the article and the followup blog post in The New York Times last Friday that discussed the growing adoption of Cloud Services in B2B and the awareness around the benefits of cloud computing.