You have just been appointed to the role of General Counsel. Maybe it is the first time you’ve ever worked in-house, or perhaps the role of GC is new to you. Whatever the circ*mstances, you will want to do what you can to get yourself up to speed as quickly as possible on what the role requires, what will be expected of you and the team, and what exactly is within your remit.
Below are my top tips for every new GC to consider as they embark on this exciting career transition.
First things first – know the business
If you are going to provide the best representation and give the most appropriate advice, it’s key you understand everything you can about the business. How well do you understand your industry, specific market, and geography? Perhaps you are working for a global conglomerate in the steel industry, or maybe it specializes in a particular metal, used for a single application, in a precise region. Either way, it is best to understand these specifics as they will be relevant to your role and your priorities.
Take into consideration whether the company is growing, in size or revenue, or whether it has been stagnant. Perhaps the company has recently gone through a major merger or acquisition or come through a crisis that precipitated the hiring of a new GC or executive team.
What do you know about your company’s reputation – both from its customers’ viewpoints as well as those of the employees? Do you sell to other businesses or directly to consumers? Do customers love your products, are they loyal? Are your employees happy and engaged?
Much of this information can be quickly gleaned from a few well-worded online searches. Review a variety of sources including news and media sites, reputation sites, and anything else that comes up via a search. All of it is relevant as it provides the background you need for better understanding your client – the company – and having more focused and relevant conversations internally.
Understand who is on the board, the reporting structure, and who has the authority for various actions and sign-off. All of this will help shape subsequent meetings and actions.
Meet your legal team
As important as it is to know your client, knowing your team is crucial to understanding your ability to deliver. Perhaps you are the first GC the company has ever had. Or maybe you have replaced someone who’s recently retired, moved on, or been asked to move on. In any of these instances, there will be a perception of what your role is and what the expectations are based on that prior experience. If you are joining an existing legal team, you will want to have a firm grasp of those dynamics.
Your team may include a broad array of individuals who have varying degrees of skills, experiences, or expertise. You will want to understand their collective capabilities, weaknesses, and expectations. Having this information will be key to understanding if and how they can deliver the work you expect. Spend time talking to each of them, individually and as a group, if possible, to both establish your rapport as well as to understand their expectations and challenges.
Get to know the C-Suite
Successful engagement with the C-Suite, the executive-level managers within the company, is critical to success. However, beyond the CEO or CFO to whom a GC may report, it’s important to establish and maintain strong working relationships with the business unit leaders and executives who are reliant on the in-house legal team for advice and guidance.
Schedule a time to meet with them. All of them. Learn more about their challenges and priorities. Get an understanding of their expectations of the legal team and their current perception of the department and its capability. Have they had a good experience? Is the team meeting their needs? Is legal perceived as the “department of no,” blockers who are focused purely on risk aversion, or are they a partner alongside the business, engaged and helping to find solutions to business challenges?
Be sure to ask what they need from legal. Think about it in the context of what the team should start or possibly stop doing. This will help you prioritize action plans and the next steps for you and your team.
Review key documents from the management teams to understand their priorities and needs. Ask to be involved in key management team meetings. Understand the goals of the company and the timing during the year when those come up so that you can prepare accordingly for next year. Be certain you understand their expectations for your budget – setting realistic budgets and sticking to those budgets is often a critical success factor.
Understand the perception of the law department
The legal team plays an important role in many aspects of a business, but if others in the company see it as an impediment to getting things done, it’s likely that they’re avoiding the department, or going around it, and creating potential risk to the business Spend time getting to know what the other business units think. How does the legal team interact with the other business units? At what point do issues reach the department? Is the team being proactive, are they consulted before decisions are made that may impact the business and require their intervention? Remember that legal is the translator – they are the ones who have to understand the business needs and recognize the legal support required, whether that’s working with auditors, regulatory structures, or other colleagues.
One of the legal function’s key roles is as risk manager for the business; however, it is helpful to also look at each risk from the perspective of the business. This is why law departments often are perceived as the bottleneck or the “department of no.” People outside the team do not often appreciate the complexities of what’s involved with some requests they have of the department; you should be able to “translate” for them, find a way to convey in simple terms the otherwise complex so that they appreciate how you can be a strategic ally.
Establish key relationships across the business and foster those that will be crucial to your success. Knowing in advance when a business will be launching a new product, opening a new site, or planning for an acquisition will enable the legal team to take a more proactive position and ensure the company is prepared from a legal standpoint.
Meet with outside counsel and other external providers.
It is typical for a law department to rely on various third parties to augment their team’s capabilities. Though that is primarily outside counsel, alternative legal service providers (ALSPs), eDiscovery vendors, and others today are just as important. Beyond the need to know the internal team’s capabilities and capacity is the need to understand who the team relies upon for other such expertise. Is it a large or small panel? How or why were those firms or vendors chosen? How are they performing?
Get to know your outside counsel. Find out what key legal issues they are looking at, how they’re managing them, and what they see as important. It’s best to get as broad of an understanding of the issues as possible.
Budget is always an important factor; outside counsel is usually the largest percentage of spend. As such, it’s important to know who the legal team is giving work to, what their respective capabilities are, and if they are delivering value for money. Meet with outside counsel and other vendors, review spending patterns, and get an understanding of how their work is being managed.
Understand what work is coming into the department
The legal team may be efficient and effective, but without understanding what they are working on, and how work is coming into the department, allocated, and tracked, it’s difficult to understand performance. Law departments can have highly diverse skillsets or be extremely narrow. To better understand whether the team has the right people and the right skills, it is best to start by knowing what they’re working on and how.
Meeting with the team, the C-suite, and the key internal clients should already have provided a reasonable amount of information about the how, what, and when of work coming into the team. Review how the team is allocating that work and whether people are managing the appropriate types and volumes. Understand why work is being sent to outside counsel and, if it would be more cost-effective to bring that work back in-house. Just the same, consider the fact that some work that currently is being done internally may be better suited to outside counsel. By understanding the big picture, it will be easier to make the case for more effective resourcing, whether that means adding or subtracting headcount.
When learning about the internal team, uncover some of the nuanced specifics of how they are delivering their work. Some little items can be important for creating a good impression – something as simple as using company templates, setting KPIs for the department that are aligned with company reporting, or ensuring appropriate use of the brand in communications will help shape perceptions of the team and its work.
Create your plan(s)
With a general understanding of the business and legal team, it’s important now to start planning. There is no substitute for having a well-thought-out strategic plan, but it’s every bit as important to create shorter-term plans with achievable results and realistic timelines. Having some ‘quick wins’ is ideal. This is an opportune time to re-evaluate the operation and decide what things the team needs to stop doing and which things it needs to start.
By this stage, you have likely uncovered what litigation the business is involved in. This sort of information may even have come to light when researching the business; reputational challenges typically involve litigation. Learning about what the business has gone through and is going through will help clarify current risk exposure and posture.
Create service level agreements (SLAs) for the department. Doing so helps formalize and communicate to others within the business what it is the team does, will do, and expectations of the team. They can be a helpful mechanism for clarifying and shaping positive perceptions of the team and its performance – both internally and externally.
Create multiple plans – for the GC role itself, the legal department organization and its operation, and then for its relationship to and with the broader corporate goals. Think about this in the context of a 30-, 90- and 100-day plan. Look for the difficult challenges as well as the easy ones. Prioritize! Look at which ideas will give the best ROI and are achievable.
Enjoy the journey!
