General Counsel

As an in-house lawyer or general counsel (GC), you have to strike a delicate balance between your professional obligations as a lawyer and your management responsibilities to the business.

Whatever your circumstances, you are likely to be working under a number of pressures, including significant time and financial constraints. You have the dual challenge of getting best value from your own resources and from your external lawyers.

We've talked to over 250 GCs operating in the UK, Europe, USA and Asia over the past two years about value and have produced two reports on our findings. We are now commencing research into our third report, due to be published in 2012.

 

General counsel report 2011

Our second report, 'General counsel: vague about value?' is based on a survey of over 100 senior in-house lawyers in which we explored what affects the perceived value of the in-house legal function. We discovered that many GCs find it difficult to prove the value that they add to a business. This makes it harder for them to become real "business counsel", operating strategically at the most senior levels within a company. In the report, we examine some of the ways in which GCs may be able to demonstrate their worth and discuss five case studies in which senior and successful in-house lawyers talk about how the issues we have raised apply to them. Download the paper here.

General counsel report 2010

Our inaugural GC survey and discussion paper From in-house lawyer to business counsel contains the results of nearly a hundred interviews with senior in-house lawyers and CEOs. It tells the story of how GCs see themselves and how much they are valued by senior management: only one third of GCs surveyed thought they were highly valued and able to influence at board level.

Download the discussion paper here. Our aim is to assist you so we've included a strategy map checklist to help you clarify objectives, improve performance and measure value, making it easier to run your legal department and increase your leadership value.

If you would like to contribute to our new research or to receive a hard copy of either of these papers, please contact Clare Jones. If you would like to have a confidential and, naturally, "off-the-clock" conversation about the topics, please contact Jonathan Warne or Peter Williamson; they are the Nabarro partners leading this initiative.


Training dates and available resources

Soft Skills Training – following on from the findings in our latest report, we are currently developing a series of professional development training courses aimed at senior in-house lawyers. Feedback from our clients on the courses we ran after the 2010 report was excellent: offering soft skills rather than legal training delivered real value to attendees and addressed an area ignored by other law firms.

Regional Discussion Dinners – last year we ran a series of discussion dinners with General Counsel in London, Sheffield and Reading. We will continue to run these facilitated discussion sessions during 2011/2012.


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