OCC Sends Lawyers Back to the Future With Legal Dept. Shakeup

The agency that supervises national banks is looking to its past in restructuring its legal department.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency in recent months has eliminated divisions in place since the 1980s that saw its lawyers specialize on discrete issues like community and consumer lending, writing rules or securities practices. Instead, the OCC will have a broad Bank Advisory group inside its Law Department, and attorneys will become more generalists than they had been in a shakeup intended to modernize how its lawyers work.

“This was a process that began before I got here. The law department’s ...