The elevator pitch, a well-known tool for salespeople and marketers, has infiltrated its way into the toolbox of job seekers. Elevator pitches are frequently recommended to those selling services, searching for a job, and those who want to improve their network of contacts. Lawyers have begun to appreciate the value of an elevator pitch to when marketing for clients, but is an elevator pitch useful for in-house lawyers? After all, in-house counsel is the law firm’s client. We get pitched to by firms; we don’t need to pitch for sales or clients.
The conventional description of an elevator pitch is a short 20-30 second pitch that can either be descriptive, informative, or persuasive, depending on the audience and the desired result of the pitch. A simple internet search will give you numerous results with recommendations for crafting an elevator pitch; these tend to be in the context of selling one’s services to potential clients or as part of a job search. The pitch generally focuses on Who/Whom (you/your audience), What (what are you doing? what do you sell?), and Why (why you?). It looks so simple, but this simple pitch generates a great deal of advice for a reason: it really isn’t all that simple.
I think it is always good to for an individual to have an elevator pitch on hand for networking events, if only to have something to talk about between crudites. We do ourselves a disservice, however, by only having a pitch available as a response to the question “What do you do?” in a forced socialization event. Just as individuals need to be ready to market themselves to potential clients or employers, as part of an in-house legal organization, in-house counsel needs to be ready to market itself to its internal customers.
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Legal departments are increasingly and rapidly becoming seen only as cost centers that have to fight daily to prove our value to our colleagues and the overall corporate entity. In-house counsel must be mindful of the stigma that comes with being the “Department of No.” A good elevator pitch, while certainly not a silver bullet to cut through this stigma, is handy to communicate the legal department’s value to the company. Having a pitch ready in internal face-to-face meetings with other departments makes it possible to communicate the value of the legal department to that department’s particular function. Obviously, it isn’t appropriate to make a hard sell to accounting during a weekly stand-up meeting, but that’s the universal tension an elevator pitch entails. The pitch has to be part of the conversation, and not forced to become the entire conversation with your conversation counterpart. It can’t really be part of any conversation at all if you haven’t put the thought into how to communicate the value of the department to the organization in general and to specific functions within the organization.
What would an internal elevator pitch sound like? Personally, I think the themes of “We helped,” “We facilitated,” or “We prevented” can be effective starting points for figuring out function-specific pitches. Let’s go back to our colleagues in accounting; an appropriate pitch for this audience could be: “We have been working to engage accounting earlier in the process to avoid surprises. We are seeing improvement in this communication. What are you seeing?” If you are in a situation to introduce yourself to colleagues and engage in a more personal conversation, an example of elevator pitch could look like: “I’m Celeste from Legal. I’ve been working with our sales department for the past year to develop a robust self-help portal for our business teams to expedite legal support. As a result, we’ve seen increased turnaround time in capturing business. It’s been great working with them to improve our response time and seeing that result in greater efficiency on their end.” If appropriate, this could lead into a question to my conversation partner about his or her department. At a minimum, the listener knows Legal is more than a group of disheveled malcontents set on ruining every opportunity that comes through the door.
Ultimately, as in-house counsel, we should be tracking and communicating our successes and accomplishments. Even if there are formal methods of communicating these accomplishments internally, it is up to the Legal department’s team to market their value to our colleagues and internal clients. As a department that usually does not generate income, we have to be smart about articulating our value in a way that doesn’t rely solely on monetary metrics. Our colleagues outside Legal are not going to do the work themselves to see the non-monetary value the Legal department brings to them. An elevator pitch is a simple tool to casually communicate that value.
It may not result in love, but with some preparation and thought, an elevator pitch tailored for an organization’s internal customers can lay the foundation for a healthy amount of like between Legal and our non-legal colleagues.
Celeste Harrison Forst has practiced in small and mid-sized firms and is now in-house at a large manufacturing and technology company where she receives daily hugs from her colleagues. You can reach Celeste directly at [email protected].