alt.legal: An MBA For Lawyers! Bruce Macmillan’s Vision

Could lawyers -- especially in-house lawyers -- benefit from an MBA made especially for them?

Bruce Macmillan

From Biglaw to business and part of the way back again, Bruce Macmillan has seen the legal landscape from all sides. He is convinced that lawyers — especially in-house lawyers — would benefit from an MBA made especially for them, and he’s working to make it a reality.

In the U.K., which Bruce calls home, experimentation is taking place in law firm models, with non-lawyer ownership of law firms allowing for outside investment and service/technology hybrids. Globally, alt.legal business models are proliferating, pulling in talent, and steering over $8.4 billion revenue from traditional legal practices.

Accordingly, the choices for in-house lawyers are more complicated than ever. In the future (present?), general counsel will have to be able to distinguish between a good technology (or service) investment, and the flavour-of-the-month hype. Once they determine who to bring on, they will likely have to make a business case to justify purchase and implementation.

Bruce believes his MBA (with CASS Business School) will help turn GCs into “senior business leaders” who will “use what they have learned to run a great legal team,” or even move on to non-legal roles.

Enjoy our interview below.

Joe Borstein: So Bruce, tell our audience a bit about your legal and business background?

Bruce Macmillan: I trained as an auditor with Arthur Andersen (I left auditing before they did!) before entering law, which I studied at Cambridge. I trained at Gouldens (now Jones Day London) and worked at SJ Berwin Brussels (later to become King Wood Mallesons – another fortunate exit!), before moving in-house in 1998.

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Later, I worked in senior management in tech, FMCG, media, start-ups and restructures, including in pan- European roles at Dell and Visa. I was also the lawyer to the regulator of lawyers (gulp!) when I was the first General Counsel of the English legal regulator the Legal Services Board, including when we made non-lawyer-owned law firms possible.

Being the GC for a challenging PE turnaround created a strong interest in what the role of a GC should be. After 16 years of not finding a clear answer, I decided to try to create a common view about what our role is – and ideally – to credentialize it through recognized training.

This opportunity became a reality in 2016 with the establishment of the Centre for Legal Leadership supported by the law firm RPC (part of the Terralex law firm network), and in 2017 with us agreeing with CASS Business School to produce a AAA-rated full MBA, specifically tailored to the needs of in-house lawyers.

JB: An MBA for in-house? What have you determined they need to know from the general business curriculum?

BM: GCs helped us choose the most relevant modules that CASS (a global top 50 school) runs, including: accounting & reporting; optimising teams; business operations; global economy, business & finance; marketing, brands & communications; transformation & information management; and governance & risk management (and some elective modules too).

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And we are taking it a stage further. With help from a (confidential) group of top-flight GCs from a range of sectors and backgrounds, we are making each module “in-house specific,” so that the content (1) addresses issues that are important to in-house lawyers and (2) sets those issues into the business context that an in-house legal team experiences. This helps the GC to operate as an effective senior business leader (or even take a non-legal role) and use what they have learned to run a great legal team too.

This all builds on the “written by GC for GC” suite of 120+ articles providing a “route map for your in house legal career” that we have at The Center for Legal Leadership website.

JB: What about alt.legal or legal tech entrepreneurs? Have you thought about how this impacts that growing community? With alternative legal service providers now doing over $4 billion in revenue (and growing), it seems like they could benefit from an MBA program.

BM: In-house lawyers break into four categories: DEAR: Driven: to make change by management or regulators; Enthusiasts: who believe that the Continuous Improvement is at the heart of what they do; Ambivalent (about change): who join up when it becomes unacceptable not to; and Resistant (to change) – well, they are steadily retiring! The Ds and Es are the people who will learn and then use the learning to innovate using alt.legal and legal tech.

So for alt.legal and legal tech, the Ds and Es on our course are your target clients and, as the course gives you a fusion of legal and business skills, it can impart the skills to go from being an in-house lawyer to being a successful part of the alt.legal or legal tech world!

JB: What do the law firms think about this? Is it better for them to have a more educated buyer, or do they see it as a potential threat?

BM: Good legal services providers do not take unreasonable advantage of the knowledge/skills asymmetry that is driving the in-house lawyer to seek help at all. For them, an educated client is an opportunity. An educated client is better able to: understand legal need in the business; explain that need to the CEO/CFO; and argue for and get the legal budget to spend with the firms.

They are more discriminating users of that extra budget (good for new law!). So they drive clearer and crisper legal services deals. But the deals are more certain with fewer surprises, disputes, and bill write-offs.

JB: Do you think the business side of law will be more appealing in the U.K. (than in the U.S.) now that ABS are allowed and more interesting and complex law firm models can be attempted?

BM: The U.K. regulatory model is certainly helping development of new ideas here. But it is often the largest international in-house teams that are forcing the pace of development internationally. And much of the practice of in-house law and the provision of legal services to in-house teams internationally is legitimately unregulated. So don’t let where you work from represent a block to being a legal innovator!

JB: Thanks Bruce! Any final words or thoughts?

BM: The world is constantly changing, so if you are not constantly and actively learning and innovating, then you are probably going backwards!


Joe Borstein Joseph BorsteinJoe Borstein is a Global Director with Thomson Reuters Legal Managed Services, delivering Pangea3 award-winning legal outsourcing services and employing over 1800 full-time legal, compliance, and technology professionals across the globe. He and his co-author Ed Sohn each spent over half a decade as associates in BigLaw and were classmates at Penn Law. (The views expressed in their columns are their own.)

Joe manages a global team dedicated to counseling law firm and corporate clients on how to best leverage Thomson Reuters legal professionals to improve legal results, cut costs, raise profits, and have a social life. He is a frequent speaker on global trends in the legal industry and, specifically, how law firms are leveraging those trends to become more profitable. If you are interested in entrepreneurship and the delivery of legal services, please reach out to Joe directly at joe.borstein@tr.com.

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