In today’s fast-paced and increasingly complex business world, companies are under constant pressure to adapt to shifting priorities, growing regulatory demands, and rising expectations from stakeholders. General counsel plays an integral role in contributing to a company’s success by providing legal advice, managing costs, navigating risk, and helping to shape business strategy.
For many lawyers, moving into a general counsel role is challenging, as the position requires a blend of legal expertise, cross-functional collaboration, and strong business acumen that traditional legal training doesn’t provide. To be effective and successful, general counsel must hone the skills and experience needed to navigate complex corporate dynamics, manage risk strategically, communicate effectively with executives and boards, and oversee diverse functions like compliance and human resources.
This white paper offers practical guidance to help lawyers successfully transition to a general counsel role. Whether you're preparing for your first general counsel role or want to sharpen your approach, these insights will help you understand the demands of the position and how to meet them with confidence.
Prepare for the general counsel role
Achieving a smooth and successful transition into a general counsel role requires thorough preparation and strategic planning. The better prepared you are going into the role, the faster you’ll be able to shift your focus to being a strategic leader within the company. As new general counsel, you can lay the foundation for success by understanding the legal, operational, and cultural challenges the company faces to ensure you can hit the ground running while effectively managing risk and supporting the company’s broader business goals.
Action steps:
- Gather detailed information about the company, the broader industry, and the legal department.
- Meet with key stakeholders such as the CEO, other executive team members, the board of directors, direct reports, and strategic peers within the company.
- Prepare a message to introduce yourself to the company as new general counsel.
- Plan how you want to approach your first 90 days and what you want to accomplish within this timeframe.
Draft a 90-day action plan
The first 90 days on the job are critical in shaping the rest of your tenure at a company. During this period, focus on building relationships, assessing the legal landscape, and establishing yourself as a trusted advisor. By acting strategically, demonstrating leadership, and focusing on high-impact areas, you’ll establish a solid foundation for yourself and the legal department.
Action steps
Focus on learning the information you need to succeed in your new role, including:
- The company’s business and how it operates.
- The company’s strategies, missions, goals, challenges, risks, and key initiatives — and how the legal department’s efforts support these.
- How to interact with and build relationships with different stakeholders.
- Performance expectations for the general counsel role.
Understand the company and its business
Legal advice is only valuable if it’s aligned with the company’s strategic goals. Gaining a strong understanding of the business and its operations is crucial to providing relevant legal guidance.
Action steps
As general counsel, your first step toward building credibility and effectiveness will hinge on quickly and thoroughly understanding the company and its business including:
- The business structure and type of entity
- The size and locations of the company’s operations
- The ins and outs of the broader industry
- The corporate culture, risk profile, and risk tolerance
- The governance and decision-making processes, including the legal department’s decision-making role
Build relationships
As general counsel, gaining the trust and confidence of the CEO, board members, and key stakeholders will be critical to your success. Working to build strong relationships early on will help you establish credibility, be more effective and influential in key decisions, and become a core part of the leadership team.
Action steps
- Understand leaderships’ goals, objectives, values, concerns, frustrations, and interests
- Modify and customize your communication approach to fit different groups and individuals
- Develop a proven track record of calmness, clear thinking, and leadership during times of crisis
- Learn how leadership defines and measures success for the legal department and general counsel role
- Tailor how you present key information to the preferences of the leadership team
- Act as a business partner by asking relevant questions and demonstrating knowledge of crucial business issues
- Share information on legal issues and solicit feedback on a range of business topics to demonstrate your value as a strategic leader within the company
Lead the legal department
As the head of the legal department, your leadership sets the tone for how well the legal team functions and operates. Effective regular communication ensures your legal team's understanding of key objectives and your expectations as a leader. This communication can help foster an environment of trust and collaboration while demonstrating your department's value to the broader organization.
Action steps
- Learn more about the legal department’s operations by conducting meetings with each legal team member to learn more about their role, challenges, objectives, and goals.
- Get to know each team member and give them the opportunity to better understand you, your management style, and expectations.
- Analyze the skills, strengths, and weaknesses of each legal team member to determine if the legal department is properly staffed.
- Look for opportunities to develop talent and train team members in different skills.
- Hold regular team meetings to review the status and staffing needs of important projects.
- Demonstrate that you value team members’ opinions by encouraging and acting on their feedback.
Evaluate legal operations
As general counsel, having a deep understanding of the legal department’s operations while looking for opportunities to save money and increase efficiency is crucial for your team’s long-term success. Review how the legal department functions quarterly to identify areas of improvement, ensure alignment with business goals, streamline workflows, mitigate and manage risks, and optimize resources. By taking the time to thoroughly assess the department's functioning, you can enhance the department’s effectiveness, strengthen the company's legal posture, and build a high-performance legal team that supports the company’s success.
Action steps
- Assess how the department delivers its work product.
- Investigate new technologies and processes that may save time, resources, and money.
- Understand and assess the legal department’s costs and allocation of resources, including personnel, technology, vendors, and outside counsel.
- Review the department’s people, processes, and technology to identify opportunities to improve efficiencies.
- Develop an actionable and achievable cost management plan.
Manage relationships with outside counsel
Turning to outside counsel may be necessary when specialized legal expertise is required, or a legal matter is simply too large, resource-intensive, or time-sensitive for your in-house legal department to manage alone. In these cases, outside counsel can provide the depth of knowledge, bandwidth, and focused experience needed to navigate complex legal issues. This ensures that your company is protected, and your internal legal team can remain focused on core responsibilities and strategic priorities. As general counsel, you’ll need to evaluate the value of outside counsel and effectively manage this relationship to ensure quality and control costs.
Action steps
- Meet with outside counsel to build rapport, understanding, and trust.
- Review and measure the quality and cost effectiveness of the services outside counsel provides.
- Consider where cost savings are available related to outside counsel through adjusted pricing models, redefined performance expectations, new strategies for increasing efficiency, and revised processes for measuring performance.
- Determine how to manage outside counsel by reviewing the department’s policies and processes and identifying areas for improvement.
Implement and report on metrics
As general counsel, you must be able to clearly demonstrate the value the legal department provides by translating how legal work drives measurable business outcomes. It’s important to regularly track and report on key metrics to show how the legal department contributes to cost efficiency, risk mitigation, and strategic goals. By implementing a regular reporting cadence, you can align legal efforts with the company’s overall business objectives and goals. This clearly articulates the legal department’s value proposition — shifting the perception of the department from a cost center to a value driver.
Action steps
- Decide what to measure and report on, and produce reports on a monthly, quarterly, and annual basis. Workload and spending metrics used to measure law department performance may include staff productivity, outside counsel performance, and total legal department spend.
- Collect data through technology solutions like contract management and automated billing systems, budget and spending reports from the accounting department, performance evaluations of outside counsel and department personnel, and information from outside counsel.
- Present data in a clear, consistent, and concise manner — tailoring your approach to meet leadership’s requirements and preferences.
Position yourself and your legal department for long-term success
Successfully stepping into the role of general counsel requires more than legal expertise — it demands business insight, leadership skills, and a strategic mindset. By applying the principles and action steps outlined in this white paper, you’ll be better prepared to meet the complex demands of the general counsel role with confidence.
From building strong relationships with key stakeholders and understanding the company’s operations to leading the legal department and implementing meaningful metrics, these foundational strategies will help you quickly gain credibility, align legal efforts with business goals, and establish yourself as a trusted advisor and effective leader.
This white paper is based on the Practice Note, Practical tips for new general counsel, one of more than 70,000 resources available through Thomson Reuters Practical Law. Get a free trial of Practical Law today.
