It’s finally spring time in my neck of the woods, and with that comes the sprouting of tulips and the celebrations of mothers and the inevitable arrival of office baby birds.
Spend any time in an in-house counsel role and you’ll see them too. Adorable, bright-eyed little things with perfectly crisp designer shirts and shiny new shoes without scuffs because their inhabitants have never had to walk a mile in them. They show up in your office on their wobbly too-big feet, chirping for your attention and turning life upside down with their misguided antics. And they end every sentence in a question, even when it’s clearly meant to be an affirmative sentence, because you know, they’re newbies. Oh, and they make three times your salary.
I, am of course, talking about outside consultants.
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Maybe your company is going through a corporate transformation or sales are flagging and a fresh perspective is needed or there’s a new accounting treatment for assets under lease and all of a sudden, your conference rooms are overtaken by the children of PwC, Deloitte, and E&Y with their slick PowerPoint presentations (heavy on the presentation, underweight on the power or the point) and charts – oh, the flip charts and bubble charts and productivity charts and process flow charts and the org charts. And what they lack in any real-world experience or knowledge of industry standards, they make up for with cockeyed optimism and ferocious can-do attitudes and an absolute unwillingness to listen. To anyone. Or reason.
Learning to navigate consultants is tricky. It’s easy to be a salty curmudgeon (like me). But I always remind myself that I’ve been in their squeaky new shoes. As a Biglaw associate, I remember being brought in to troubled or recently merged companies under the guise of implementing transition plans. I was paid to think outside the box and no suggestion I made was too outlandish because after all, I was the expert being paid six figures to do what people at the company couldn’t seem to suss out for themselves.
I was an idiot. A dangerous and thoroughly annoying idiot.
It’s through that lens that I consider these young consultants, desperate to prove themselves and contribute to the solution and the justification of the exorbitant fees their consulting firms charge. It’s a broken system, but it’s (generally) not these kids’ fault.
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When they come looking for me — and they always come looking for me with requests for hundreds of contracts to be pulled and non-existent processes to be explained — I try to be kind and patient. And when that fails, I remind myself these munchkins are probably too young to buy beer. Or rent cars without some sort of surcharge. And that makes me feel slightly better.
So, I go to their meetings and treat them much the way I treat my business counterparts: I disabuse them of the fantasies they’ve created in their head and the role of Legal as ultimate problem solver. And then I arm with information and resources that may eventually help them to be useful members of our business ecosystem.
First, I lay out the legal landscape, most importantly, what our document management system can and can’t do. It can’t, for example, tell you how many forklifts have been added to Schedule 1.6 since the contract was inked in 2015. It can’t because the business doesn’t go to Legal every time it wants to buy a forklift. Not only is that asinine because forklifts aren’t that expensive but it’s a colossal waste of everybody’s time. When the business wants a forklift, they execute a PO through Procurement. So if consultants want that that kind of data, they should have Procurement run an equipment search through the POs using the vendor’s name.
Second, clarify the role of Legal. My role is to manage and mitigate risk within our business. This often takes the form of contract negotiation for new engagements and products. Or interpreting existing contracts and legal language. Or serving as an advisor/adult/mud pit wrestling referee on new policies and processes. But I do not play the role of mob or hockey enforcer. I do not kneecap or illegally check the business into the boards with more force than absolutely necessary. Nor do I drive or fly seven hours to ensure that yes, there are in fact MDMS sheets actually posted in our facilities where required. We have quality, safety, compliance, and plant personnel that do that kind of thing.
Third, I help outside consultants holistically understand the business (holistic in this example means I do not use expletives, as it makes their little eyes bug out). My experience with consultants is that more often than not, this is their first gig out of school and they fail to understand why something has gone forward without a process in place. I am a good person to explain this because I myself had to learn this when I left Biglaw and went In-house. The answer is simple and ugly.
Because it has to. Because a business has to make money. Because sometimes process is only implemented after there has been a demonstrated need for it (read: major eff-up).
This will inevitably upset the outside consultants. It’s okay. It’s good for them to be upset. It builds character. And once you’ve delivered all the bad news and the limitations of the world they need to solve solutions for, it’s now time to point them in the direction of resources they can leverage. Of course, I’ll inevitably offer to serve as a backstop if they get stuck and can’t find the person or information they need. I’ll do for them what I do for the business. I’ll try and solve their impossible problem or go find someone who can. Because I’m a big sucker. But in general, the best thing you can do for them is to arm them with life skills that enable them to leave the nest.
And if they’re still showing up in your office with their sad, baby bird eyes, you can always offer to buy them beer.
Kay Thrace (not her real name) is a harried in-house counsel at a well-known company that everyone loves to hate. When not scuffing dirt on the sacrosanct line between business and the law, Kay enjoys pub trivia domination and eradicating incorrect usage of the Oxford comma. You can contact her by email at [email protected] or follow her on Twitter @KayThrace.