Welcome to The Client’s Advocate, a blog focused on strategic financial reporting issues impacting the CFO, their executive policy making staff and the audit committee. As is the practice with blogs, space will occasionally be given to the broader spectrum of business finance & marketplace issues that are considered relevant and of value to the CFO/audit committee function.

This blog got its legs from a good friend and colleague who I first met when I joined the Washington, DC staff of the Securities & Exchange Commission in 1990, Broc Romanek, editor of TheCorporateCounsel.net. Broc’s been a dedicated blogger on the subject of securities law since 2002 and has developed quite the brand with an avid following. His success is rooted in his wisdom to invent and lead in a space anchored to traditional forms of information exchange.

We swap stories about our practice experiences when I join him on his conference circuit. Each time he’s suggested the relevance and value of a blog for articulating the things we speak about privately, in public. But it was on a recent trip to Seattle that I finally got it. The value and place for business-minded blogs.

We were visiting one of our SEC era friends who we hadn’t seen since he departed Expedia’s founding team. On the way to his place from the airport, I sat in on a brief meeting with Broc and a former litigator turned successful blog entrepreneur. It was focused on the state of the blog and its value to the law community. I listened while they talked.

Meetings inherently have someone’s interests at their heart but I was listening to a discussion led principally by an earnest interest to break blogging open on the mainstream law platform. Someone would benefit financially at some juncture but the root energy driving the ideas going back and forth was the genuine goodwill of bringing others into a forum where ideas & knowledge are loosed for the sake of better things coming of it.

So I’ve climbed on board the train. Practice and professional information are handled on the “About: Practice” page. Other links to the corporate website, as yet emerging blogroll and related items are collected at the end of the blog page.