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Are in house lawyers wearing too many hats? Are you?

Take a second to evaluate just what you do for your current company. Do you provide legal advice? What about business advice? And to whom? Are you advising the Board of Directors and the Chief Executive Officer as an individual?

This may seem like an unnecessary barrage of questions, but they're incredibly important. Regulators and investors are out for blood, and you may just be exposing yourself to potential liability.

Meat processing giant AFA Foods has filed for bankruptcy-court protection due to controversy stemming from "pink slime," a ground beef filler. The company says the pink slime bankruptcy was brought on by slumping sales.

Pink slime is ammonia-treated boneless lean beef trimmings that is often added to ground beef. It has been approved for use for years by the USDA, the Los Angeles Times reports.

However, any in-house counsel worth their salt knows that even if something is deemed okay by the government, that alone isn't reason enough to do nothing.

Attention attorneys: You may want to remember today as "Facebook buys Instagram" day. Or "Instagram Bought by Facebook" day, whichever you prefer grammatically.

The social network giant paid about $1 billion in cash and stock for Instagram, a popular photo-sharing application, the Los Angeles Times reports. The purchase means some interesting changes for Facebook's users, who will be able to post and follow users on other social networks, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's CEO, said in (what else) a Facebook post.

But for general counsels (especially those in tech), the move means so much more.

The country is still talking about Rush Limbaugh and his statements about Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke. Besides calling her a prostitute, he encouraged her and her fellow students to post online sex videos. She warranted these words solely because she believes birth control should be a mandatory part of insurance coverage.

Limbaugh's statements garnered criticism from the right and left, from women and men. It was so bad, he apologized. Except, it wasn't an apology at all. In fact, it was so not an apology, his public statement is a good example of how general counsel should not respond to criticism of corporate action.

Networking isn't just for job-seekers. In-house counsel can also benefit by making connections that can work for your daily practice in more ways than one.

For example, you can network with in-house counsel at other companies to share ideas and talk shop. You can also use networking to reinforce ties with your company's non-legal employees, so they'll feel comfortable coming to you when legal issues arise.

There are so many tips out there about how to make networking work. Here are some tips that in-house counsel may find particularly helpful:

The Jacksonville Jaguars' Paul Vance apparently fumbled in drafting a series of team contracts, and now he's out of a job.

The Jaguars' new owner fired Vance as the team's general counsel and vice president of football operations Sunday, ESPN reports. A potentially costly typo is likely to blame.

The typo appears in the contracts of seven former assistant coaches who signed contract extensions in 2010, according to ESPN.

The team intended the extensions to last two years, through the end of the 2011 season. Instead, the contracts explicitly state the agreements "shall terminate on the later of January 31, 2012 or the day after the Jaguars' last football game of the 2012 season and playoffs," according to ESPN.

Here's a recent New York ruling worth sniffing. Judge Jed S. Rakoff temporarily barred Clorox from airing its cat litter ads. He agreed with Clorox rival Church & Dwight's assessment that the ads would cause irreparable harm.

Church & Dwight makes Arm & Hammer cat litter. The company sued Clorox for running ads that said carbon-treated cat litter was better at combating odors compared to baking soda.

Let's face it: you'd rather have your employees report securities violations to you first before they tell the SEC.

Internal reporting has its advantages. You'll be better prepared. You also won't get suddenly drawn into a SEC investigation without prior warning.

But how do you get your employees to report violations to you first? Below are a few tips to help:

It's a sign of the economic times: More companies are handing legal tasks to their in-house counsel, and outside law firms are losing out.

A survey of companies with in-house legal teams showed a 6% uptick for in-house expenditures last year, compared with 1% growth in 2009.

Corporate spending on outside legal services declined by 3% in 2010, the ABA Journal reports.

Case in point: Minnesota-based Jones Lang LaSalle, a real-estate and investment-management giant.

Private consumer data can be a minefield, especially when you consider the complexity of data management systems and rapidly changing technology. Which is why Van Dang, Cisco's deputy general counsel, has decided to take a collaborative approach.

Dang recently created a cloud-based privacy compliance portal on the company's website. On it, she shares Cisco's privacy policy and compliance mechanisms, as well as a library of reference materials.

She even invites outside law firms and fellow general counsel to chime in.