GC's Eye View

As a result of my experience leading a company for a period earlier this year, I've been asked on several occasions to speak to groups of lawyers about the role of a company's in-house Legal Department when viewed from the CEO's chair. The exact questions that people suggest I attempt to answer vary and are phrased with more elegance but, in ordinary language, they boil down to this: (1) What is Legal's job? (2) How is Legal doing? (3) Does anyone care? Arguably, there's a danger of Legal Departments becoming overly introspective in seeking to answer these questions. Indeed, in the very first post on this blog, I asked " Why is it that, when it comes to the world of business, lawyers spend a lot of time agonising about their role and trying to articulate clearly how they add value, instead of getting on and leading their organisations?" But that was intended to be provocative and it's too harsh.  Legal departments have been on a necessary journe...

The word “metrics” is so commonly used in modern business life that nobody thinks they need a definition of the term. It hardly occurred to me to look it up before starting this blog. But we probably ought to, because there's a fair bit of groupthink on this topic. If you open the Oxford English Dictionary, once you’ve made it past the definition of the “ metric system ”, which remains a surprisingly lively political topic, you'll find “ metrics (in business) ” defined as: “ a set of figures or statistics that measure results ”. That’s short, but it will probably do. After discussing metrics with a large number of senior legal colleagues over the past year, I’ve concluded that metrics are widely distrusted by the legal profession. The topic certainly polarizes opinions. The most common charge made against metrics is that they provide a reductivist view of an activity which involves complex interactions that aren’t really capable of or susceptible to numerical measurement...

I found an hour this week to attend a very interesting roundtable discussion at Allen & Overy organised by RSG Consulting, who run the annual Innovative Lawyers awards in the FT. The topic was "In-house legal: Talent engagement and retention". Various heavyweight luminaries of the in-house scene were there and the debate was very interesting. Inevitably we covered the interaction between in-house Legal teams and HR. There were a couple of comments in this section which deserve to be examined more closely, because they tell you a lot about why Legal isn't part of the mainstream in many companies. The first comment was that lawyers looking to broaden their career could go into HR. Excuse me? Let's just try that the other way around. HR managers looking to broaden their career could go into Legal and give that a go. Or perhaps if people in Legal or HR are bored, they might like to try being the company's Financial Controller? A quick read through IFRS ought to...