By Erin Geiger Smith

Oct 5 (Reuters) - The nation's largest organization for corporate counsel, concerned that prosecutors and regulators may be targeting in-house counsel when their employers are in trouble, has launched a project to document the frequency and likelihood of such cases.

The Association of Corporate Counsel in recent weeks has reached out to law firms asking them to relay information on the experiences of their clients, said Amar Sarwal, the ACC's chief legal strategist.

"The government, regulators, perhaps even opposing counsel, have a target on your back," Sarwal told a ballroom full of in-house counsel attending the association's annual convention in Orlando, Florida, on Monday.

There is no known data on how often, or in what manner, in-house lawyers are ensnared by government investigations and prosecutions. But there have been a handful of public ones in recent years, including the Securities and Exchange Commission's 2010 administrative decision against the former general counsel of Ferris, Baker Watt, a financial services firm, for failing to supervise a broker, and the prosecution of a former top lawyer for Purdue Pharma, who was convicted of failing to supervise employees who made inappropriate statements relating to the drug OxyContin.

Corporate counsel have been especially fascinated by the prosecution, beginning in 2009, of Lauren Stevens, a former GlaxoSmithKline senior attorney, who was accused of making false statements to the Food and Drug Administration.

A featured speaker at the Orlando gathering, Stevens recounted to more than 1,000 in-house counsel how seven years after advising Glaxo during an investigation, she was told she would be indicted for making allegedly false statements to the FDA.

At the time, Stevens said she was preparing to visit her college-age daughter in Europe.

"You've got to be kidding me," Stevens said she told the colleague who informed her she was the target of a Justice Department investigation. It was "unsettling to find myself sitting in a federal courtroom as a defendant for what I believed ... was doing my job," she said.

After the initial indictment was thrown out because prosecutors inaccurately characterized one of her defenses to the grand jury, Stevens was re-indicted and brought to trial in 2011. But before the case went to the jury, Maryland U.S. District Judge Roger Titus dismissed it, criticizing the prosecution for targeting Stevens for merely performing her obligations as counsel. The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment.

Brien O'Connor, who did not attend the convention but who represented Stevens throughout her ordeal, said he doubted that there would be "a rash of new prosecutions." Still, the Stevens saga resonated with the audience of in-house attorneys at the conference. One lawyer even passed up a note to Stevens thanking her on behalf of all of them for fighting the charges.

The government has developed a "strategy of prosecuting gatekeepers" like in-house counsel, compliance officers and auditors to send a message that those employees should immediately report any wrongdoing to the government, Michael Volkov said in a separate interview. A partner at LeClaireRyan who specializes in white collar defense and internal investigations, he did not attend the conference.

During her talk, Stevens spoke warmly both about her legal team and Judge Titus, whom she said grasped what was at stake for in-house attorneys. During the finger-printing and mug-shot process that followed her indictment, she recalled one person in the room saying to her "In all seriousness, this isn't going to ruin your legal career, is it?"

Though Stevens is partially retired, she still does consulting work for Glaxo.

The ACC's program to track the frequency of cases like Stevens's is only the beginning of the association's attempts to follow this issue, said Sarwal, the group's legal strategist. Though he does not have a time frame for making the findings public, he said he expects to have the first round of responses within a few weeks.

Follow us on Twitter @ReutersLegal | Like us on Facebook