UnitedHealth Group Inc.’s announcement Sunday that general counsel David Lubben would step down highlights the impact of the stock-options backdating scandal on in-house lawyers, the Wall Street Journal reports.

At least seven general counsels, lawyers who sit atop a company’s in-house legal department, have left their jobs in the wake of a backdating investigation. Just last week, the top lawyers at CNET Networks Inc. and Boston Communications Group Inc. resigned in the wake of internal investigations into those companies’ options practices.

The general-counsel position hasn’t traditionally been known as a particularly risky job: Often a general counsel passes the bread-and-butter legal work along to in-house staffers and farms out the bet-the-company litigation and mergers-and-acquisitions work to seasoned outside counsel.

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