About

Editor’s note: This interview was conducted prior to March 2020.

How do you feel in-house legal leaders can successfully introduce and implement a culture within a legal department?

I have always been a strong proponent of mentoring. Specific to a legal department, mentorship fills a gap that would not otherwise be filled but for having a strong supporter in one’s corner. As we progress in our legal careers, we often take for granted how confusing even small things seemed at first. For this reason, it is especially important to ensure that lawyers on a legal team have a mentor that is also in the legal field. Other executive leaders offer an additional dimension, but in order to feel comfortable and confident in one’s growth as a lawyer, a legal mentor is necessary. Implementing a mentoring programme, even an informal one, shows that an investment is being made in the development of the legal team, far beyond budget line items. Individuals that one may have never met before may be surprisingly willing to mentor. I encourage my mentees and others to reach out to their “aspirational” mentor and see what happens. Nothing to lose – only great supporters to be gained!

How do you suggest in-house lawyers build strong relationships with business partners within their company?

Break down those walls between “the business side” and the “legal side.” In a highly functioning and dynamic organisation, all teams come together to achieve the company’s goals. What does this mean, practically speaking, for an in-house legal department? Don’t be a lawyer that deals only with theoretical risks and only reserving the right to say “I told you so”. Understand and appreciate business objectives when providing legal guidance.

When business partners come to their in-house lawyers for advice, the legal team should feel not only comfortable, but empowered, as they should receive advice that goes beyond only the legal perspective. An exciting aspect of being in-house should be connectivity to the business and a deeper understanding of the company. General counsel and their team should strive to remind themselves of this and it will certainly prove to enrich their roles and increase engagement.

What techniques do you use to provide commercially-focused advice to your company, and how do you communicate these to more junior lawyers in the team?

Breaking down any “legal versus business” barriers has always been an important goal of mine, within each organisation for which I have served as general counsel. I prioritise going to sales, finance, HR, operations, compliance and other departmental meetings. Despite the limited hours in the day to sit down at the desk and draft documents, or do other “legal work”, my focus on attending meetings with other teams has proven to be the most instrumental in my role as general counsel. Cultivating this deeper understanding of what is going on within each facet of the business has enriched the type, practical nature and application of the legal advice that I provide.

FOCUS ON: PRIORITIES

Ask any general counsel what their priorities are and they will tell you that they are responsible for a plethora of legal-related matters, and, more often than not, near the top of that list will be risk mitigation. Companies that are in the growth or scaling phase must justify all of their headcount in legal. Typically, legal is seen as a cost centre and not a revenue generator and focusing on risk mitigation is often a tough sell when fighting for headcount.

Ideally, a company would alter this paradigm and seek to quantify the value of prevention, contract optimisation and other ways that legal teams seek to reduce risk in everything they do. To date, I’ve not seen any KPIs that can readily measure such value. Indeed, such a calculation would be a complex one but it certainly does not follow that simply because it is hard to measure, that it does not warrant doing so. At a high level, it is easy to understand the inherent value of how a well negotiated contract can add to a company’s bottom line by saving money or increasing ability to generate revenue, or how a bulletproof indemnity saved the company millions when an indemnifiable claim arose.

As such, lawyers are forced to show their value through the execution portion of transactions. A premium is placed on how fast and how efficiently a transaction was completed as opposed to how well the underlying documents were negotiated so as to avoid any potential unnecessary risks or liabilities. For this reason, it is typical to see that increasing headcount in legal teams is most supported when increasing outside counsel spend occurs and there is a corresponding drive by the organisation to find savings with respect to such spending. However, the value of a strong in-house legal team goes far beyond a corresponding decrease in outside counsel costs. Determining a way to successfully measure this more robust understanding of value should be a goal of all organisations looking to grow their legal teams.

The following are a few thoughts on how to help remind your organisation of the risk your legal department mitigates:

Track near misses: Savings derived from prevention are hard to track, however “close calls” often resonate with people on an emotional level. Make sure the business team understands and remembers them and the work done by the legal department to prevent such issues from escalating.

Don’t assume that anyone knows what you are doing: In my experience, when people have limited projects or deliverables they often talk about them a lot – when people have a myriad of projects on the go it is difficult to convey the scope or breadth of what is being worked on.

Make a risk reduction a definable project: Turning risk reduction into the core driver of a particular tangible project allows for risk reduction to be understood as a KPI instead of an abstract concept.

Build a solid relationship with the CFO: The CFO usually understands risk the same way a general counsel does. As such, they can be your advocate and ally with the rest of management to help them understand that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

Remind your CEO what other companies did wrong: Read the news, stay abreast of current events. Pointing to other company’s risk mitigation failures reminds them about what a good job your legal department is doing!