General counsel today have better tools and technology — along with more legal acumen — than ever before. But those advantages haven’t alleviated their concerns over how best to obtain efficient, predictable, and cost-effective legal service from their outside law firms or how best to run their own legal departments in more efficient and cost-effective ways, while being the guardian of the company’s legal reputation and values.
General counsel must be supreme overseers in this guardian role, knowing the company depends on their insight, vision, and legal advice for all matters. Internally, they must run their departments tightly, carefully analyzing their legal spend even as they feel the pressure to do more with less. Through all this, GCs have to cast a wide net, searching for every efficiency — whether through outsourcing to alternative providers, pushing their outside counsel to embrace technology, or simply streamlining the practice management within their own department — in order to satisfy the corporate departments and business units that are their clients.
Even through all of that, truly fearless general counsel share these six critical attributes:
- FEARLESS GCs ARE PRINCIPLED
One of the most vital areas where a general counsel can demonstrate the ability to be fearless is in helping the company conduct business in ethical and legal ways that align with the company’s values and objectives. GCs must act as the custodian for the company’s values and principles — in effect, they are the company’s conscience and gatekeeper.
One GC talked about how, as part of her vision for the legal department, she can be called upon to challenge her CEO and board of directors on how best to handle controversial, sensitive, or high-stakes decisions. Dealing with this means juggling the many competing business, personal, and political considerations in resolving difficult issues that sometimes have no clear right or wrong answers. “To be honest, being a GC often means being willing to lose your job on any given day if it enables you to assert your position as forcefully as is required.”
- FEARLESS GCs ARE AGILE
Businesses today operate in an increasingly fast-paced, complex environment shaped by globalization, regulatory expansion, and rising stakeholder demands. General counsel are pressured by their internal clients to know the answers, provide quality legal services, control costs, and manage risk effectively across all areas of law. To balance and perform these functions, agility is an absolutely necessary trait. The fearless GC is agile enough to tackle diverse projects that touch on all areas of the law, ranging from contracts to compliance, corporate governance, intellectual property, M&A, employment, litigation, and beyond.
This agility allows the GC to leverage experience and resources to respond appropriately as situations and challenges evolve.
What else does it take for general counsel to perform fearlessly in every situation, no matter what kind of obstacles, crises, or storm fronts they face? Click here to read the complete article now.