Optimise Legal, to survive and thrive

Article #1 from our new Legal Optimisation Blog Series

Whether you’re the first in-house lawyer in your company, a new arrival in a young company with a nascent legal function or heading up an established function, you’re facing a blizzard of challenges. It’s tough, but if you can learn how to navigate it, it can be immensely rewarding.

This is article #1 in a series from The Law Boutique, aimed at helping general counsel and other in-house lawyers run a high performing, fully optimised legal function. Your feedback on this piece and others in the series is very welcome.

Who is this for?

In-house lawyers, especially those in tech and tech-related growth companies and in particular those who are new to their role.

Reading time?

5 to 7 minutes

Why this series?

Since founding The Law Boutique in 2017, we’ve come to a conclusion: the problems facing in-house lawyers are all the same.

No matter the size of the company, from established market leaders to high-growth challengers, we see the same issues crop up again and again. The same challenges, the same issues and the same mistakes.

Law is an incredibly subtle business, something people who aren’t in the profession don’t often grasp.

A legal function is tricky to plan, complex to manage and problematic to budget accurately — problems the average company board doesn’t want to hear about.

Lawyers working in-house can have very rewarding and intense careers, but there are many unique pitfalls which those outside of the profession will never have to deal with.

Over this series of articles, we’ll tackle a wide range of topics in as much detail as we can to share what we’ve found.

We will look in turn at technical issues, process management and so forth, but also more personal ones such as having the right mindset, communication and how to build the relationships which will be key to your success.

Who should be reading?

We’ve aimed this series at those of you in fast-growth companies — whether you’re starting a legal team from scratch, inheriting a small team launched by a predecessor or getting to grips with a function you’ve already assembled.

This article gives a flavour of some of the topics we’re going to be covering, a feel for our approach, outlines our overriding thesis and provides some food for thought as we go.

How we got here?

The Law Boutique was founded in 2017 with the mission of transforming in-house Legal teams into growth enablers.

Having spent years in-house — in both long-established corporates like Disney and British American Tobacco and fast-growth scale-ups — we found that more often than not, the way legal operated and interacted with the business was not fit for purpose.

We set out to change this. We started off by helping overloaded legal teams with their contract overflow but soon after began helping them with the more fundamental way they operated as a team. We found that one of the reasons they were overloaded was not just the immense workload but also their approach to it.

So, without any further ado, let’s get cracking.

Three key insights…

Our experience has led us to three key insights which form the foundation of our thesis:

1. Lawyers want to add as much value as possible but there is a natural conflict of interest between that desire and their obligation to protect their business.
2. The business can benefit immensely from its lawyers but doesn’t always expect to or know how to get the best out of them.
3. Lawyers know law, but they don’t always know how to build an operationally effective legal function.

…and two main problems.

Conflict of interest

Lawyers get a bad rep for being ‘risk-averse’ but in our experience, a lawyer who goes into a fast-growth tech company already displays a higher risk appetite than many of their peers. Having said that, any lawyer’s primary function is to protect. The business, on the other hand, prioritises growth.

The CEO in a fast-growth environment must take risks — after all, with no risk comes no reward. The lawyer intellectually understands this but sees the underlying tension — they want to add value and help the business grow but will think primarily about protecting the business, both from apparent threats and from threats the business cannot know about in the moment (those famous ‘unknown unknowns’).

What results is often a continuous tug of war, which can easily result in lawyers being locked out of important developments, denied the opportunity to add value because of their ‘otherness’.

The idea of ‘otherness’

Lawyers are not like other businesspeople. Chaos — creative or otherwise — is anathema to them. The kind of flexibility that other functions are used to — “muddling along” — cannot happen in Legal without creating unconscionable risks.

Lawyers are precise, they are driven to define, to correct, to protect and to always think the unthinkable. Often, they’ll use legalese, a highly specific mode of communication between lawyers but fussing, baffling and sometimes downright obstructive when dealing with non-lawyers.

Hence lawyers are seen as ‘other’ — with some justification — and the result is that the legal function is all too often siloed, restricting its capability and potential.

So, with those insights and issues in mind, here are some of the key themes we are going to cover as the series progresses:

• Overwhelm. Lawyers in a new legal function can quickly become overwhelmed with the sheer volume of enquiries, the apparent need to institute new legal processes and documentation throughout the business and the inevitable resource constraint. Don’t let Legal become the business bottleneck. We’ll look at how to avoid this situation, and the fixes if you’re already in it.
• Morale. If you’re firefighting constantly, morale will suffer. That complicates recruitment and retention, saps your energy and degrades your performance — it’s a downward spiral. We’ll look at how to bring order to chaos and calm those nerves.
• Risk alarm. One of the most devastating things for a lawyer is the sense that risks are not being signed-off properly, especially if this becomes systemic, when risks can pile up and the problem deepens. We’ll look at how to nip this pernicious problem in the bud, and how to de-escalate if things get unmanageable.
• Downward pressure. Managing with limited resources is par for the course in high growth companies, which need to run lean and run fast, but explaining Legal to a business which has little experience of what it can achieve is tricky. We’ll look at justifying your spend, resisting attacks on your budget and demonstrating value.
• Communication. Good communication is an obvious aim but can be challenging in a commercial environment which often feels alien to lawyers. We’ll look at how to plan your communications with the rest of the business, how to build alliances and how to build your personal brand, which will be key to your success.
• Strategy. All too often in-house lawyers are shut out of the strategy process in the companies they work for, which severely curtails their effectiveness and ability to add value. We’ll look at how to design a strategy for Legal and why it’s crucial to align it with the company’s strategy.
• Lawyer psyche. This is all the stuff you know but may not realise you know. Lawyer psyche is one of the main reasons lawyers struggle in-house. We’ll take a deep dive into the murky waters and look at how to adjust your mindset to match your intended role, so you don’t get submerged.

Philosophy: Optimise Legal and be an enabler for your business.

The through-line for all of the issues we’ve highlighted so far is how to optimise your Legal function so that you become an enabler for the business, rather than a blocker.

Part of that is good administration, part of it is clever strategy, part of it is good communication, but all of rests on having the right mindset: understanding your business so well that strategising, managing and optimising become natural to you.

With that in mind we’ll cover a wide range of technical and management issues too, including:

• Cutting your cloth. Managing with limited resources is a fact of life in a high growth company. There’s no rule book and the learning curve can be steep. We’ll take a look at the options.
• Strategy before tech. You might see technology as a quick fix, but unless you’ve done some careful planning, it can be an expensive road, full of blind alleys. Plan first, install later, but this area can be a minefield.
• Managing the day to day. Sounds the most obvious thing, but how you manage your workload and your team day to day will have a huge impact on whether and how you succeed. We’ll take a good look at this one including time management, task allocation and communication.
• Process documentation. Creating an efficient and effective operating model will be at the heart of a successful strategy for Legal. We’ll look at how to get it right and some of the most common missteps.
• Governance. Often overlooked, but vital. Just as there is no ‘off the peg’ legal operating strategy, so the governance model and management structure will have to be developed to fit the organisation you’re working in. We’ll talk spans and layers, hubs and spokes.
• Outsourcing and supplier relationships. Get this right and you’ll save yourself a lot of grief and the company a lot of money. Get it wrong, and it’s a money pit which will end up damaging your personal brand and dent your ability to get more resource in future.

Where to start?

Looking at the above, you might be tempted to think: “where do I start? This is all important!!”

And you know what? You’re right. It is all important.

One of the temptations coming into an organisation which has not previously had a legal function is to try to address yourself to all the issues you see at the same time. It might go without saying that this is a recipe for disaster, but it’s amazing how many people get sucked into firefighting from Day One and never stop.

In addition to all the functional things you’ll need to do, you’ll also need to develop a sense for what Legal might and can achieve during your tenure running the Legal team. Your ability to accurately define and create a targeted strategy will determine how effective your subsequent designs — documents, processes, protocols — are going to be.

Getting the setup right is crucial, but chances are you’ll be inheriting either an existing department or an informal setup where legal issues can be addressed — though typically not often enough or early enough.

You’ll need to learn to delegate effectively and outsource anything you decide is non-core. You’ll then need to train the business on how best to work with Legal, what it can expect from you and what you’re going to have to look outside for help with.

Once all those building blocks are in place, that’s the time to look for technology to do some of the heavy lifting, so you can get on with what you do best.

However, navigating your early circumstances is going to be as much about managing your own mindset and letting the right mindset flow into interpersonal situations — such as team management, communication with the board and with the departments of the company — as well as working for you and not against you. It’s very easy to fall into a slump if you’re overwhelmed, and that is going to make things more difficult still.

In the next piece we’ll look at strategy: what we mean by a strategy for Legal, how to go about constructing one and how to get yourself in the strategic mindset.

Read the second instalment of this series: The dos and don’ts of in-house legal strategy.