Assignment: Legal Leadership Discussion
Assignment: Legal Leadership Discussion
Assignment: Legal Leadership Discussion
Week 10 discussion Effective Ethical, Moral, and Legal Leadership In this ungraded and voluntary discussion board, please post any questions or examples that may help your colleagues better understand an ethical, moral, or legal dilemma. Click on the Reply button below to reveal the textbox for entering your message. Then click on the Submit button to post your message.
When pieces on leadership in legal departments were requested for this issue of Corporate Counsel Connect, I knew exactly what I wanted to write about but had no idea how to express it. Leadership is something that is inherently good in most every situation, but really difficult to define – you often “know it when you see it,” but can’t reduce the concept into an easy description that’s helpful in situations requiring it or for those who want to cultivate it.
In law departments, leadership has many faces: the CLO, the managing attorneys, the servicing lawyers who work each day with the clients, and law department executives should all be leaders. And, of course, while every lawyer must be a leader, each must also be a superb collaborative team member (promoting harmony within the department, and in synch with their clients, outside counsel, external vendors, and co-venturists). And, let’s not forget how important it is for every leader and collaborative team member to balance their innovative focus on the future with the urgent requirements of daily work. Most leaders are interested in continuous improvement and growth (which requires comfort with change), but the reality is that it’s hard to “turn a battleship in a bathtub.” In short, law department leaders have to be self-aware, yet completely tuned in to what and who is around them; they must provide distinguishing service, great results, and extraordinary thought leadership while hitting all the assigned notes as one voice in a larger choir.
I know I’m making it sound impossible, and I really don’t mean to convey that leadership is so hard that it’s not achievable. What I do want to convey is that while there are some folks who seem like “natural leaders,” leadership is just not as “natural” as we have all been led to believe; it’s a very carefully cultivated skill and requires hard work. The challenge of leadership in the law department is closely connected to success in mindfully pursuing that which will drive forward the good things that make everyone more successful and work more worthwhile.
For top in-house lawyers, leadership is not gauged by measuring personal legal acumen or claiming the record for longest hours worked, but rather is measured by how you can leverage talented teams to deliver measurable results and advance the client’s business goals. Legal acumen or expertise is important, but it’s table stakes; distinguishing value derives from legal executive leadership (hence, the reason I so named my practice).
I think this is true for leadership in law firms, too, but with significant differences. As firms struggle to move from being providers of Law 1.0 (“Hey, clients! Our associates use computers to produce documents, and we communicate all the time on our smartphones and via email!”), or to become providers of Law 2.0 (“Okay, we haven’t really changed the way we work or what we sell, but now we can offer you an AFA, and we’re hiring project managers and installing a new system next week, so we’ll have lots more data to ignore!”), they’re really unsure of whether they even want to think about Law 3.0. This is where lawyers will fundamentally change their business model to anticipate the way that companies wish to buy services going forward, as well as the kinds of solutions they want to purchase (which is not better management of problems, but the elimination of problems).
True law department leaders are thinking about how to leverage Law 3.0 as the coming moment that will define their careers and re-invent the way that law is both practiced and delivered. Law 3.0 is when lawyers stop thinking like lawyers and start acting like leaders.
So what does practical leadership look like in law departments if the goal is to move toward Law 3.0, but keep legal services rolling as incremental change is nurtured?
For general counsel, the trick to leading seems to be in finding the balance between their role as an accessible and engaged participant in the C-Suite and strategic corporate management, and their role as department manager of (and in smaller departments, to personally provide) the legal services required by daily corporate operations. I like to think of this as the challenge of keeping your eyes simultaneously lifted toward the horizon and fixed downward so you don’t stumble on the treacherous path beneath your feet.
Many general counsel (except solos) meet this challenge by focusing their time and talent on the C-suite issues and appointing a senior department lawyer or operations manager to run the business function and supervise the legal work in the department. That doesn’t mean that the GC isn’t interested in or involved in law department operations, but rather that he or she appoints a second to manage the function under his or her leadership.
For the person who is the department’s operations manager, the leadership challenge is to give effect to the general counsel’s vision and direction, while enabling the daily work of the other lawyers and staff members. Frankly, this role is somewhat harder, in my view, than that of the CLO’s, in that while the CLO has to be an excellent advisor and business-savvy partner in the company’s leadership, the legal operations manager has to be all that and figure out how to staff the work, stretch the budget, deliver the right talent to the highest priority challenges, and equip the function with technology, support staff, internal resources, coordination with other corporate departments, and so on. Most lawyers don’t have much (if any) training in these kinds of skills, and so the operations leader either learns on the job and finds people to whom important roles can be delegated, or fakes it, which is when they are most likely to fail as leaders. It seems that half of leadership in this role is learning when to let others lead, and then recognizing and rewarding them for it.
