In my last post, I talked about the need for each in-house lawyer to really participate in the business of his or her company. Not only as a legal expert but also as a business executive. In-house lawyers need to be both. I take to task all lawyers who go only half way, by t-ing up legal analysis but then running away from business decisions.
In this post, I go the other direction. Here, I want to recognize how difficult it can be for in-house lawyers to really participate in certain aspects of business. For example, I recognize that it can be hard for lawyers working with business development and sales groups to take a leadership role. It often is difficult to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with executives who design business development and sales deals. Why is this so? The one word answer is: "customers."
Someone once told me that every successful executive within a company has at some point "carried the company bag." What he meant is that one cannot understand the business of a company unless one has represented that company on sales calls. In his opinion, until one has gone out, time and again, and had the door slammed in his or her face when pushing the company product or service, one can't understand the business well enough to lead it. This sounds right to me.
Unfortunately, this is bad news for in-house lawyers who would like to progress out of the role of lawyer and into the role of effective senior leader.
In my experience, in-house lawyers are seldom asked to make customer calls or to meet with their company's strategic partners in the early stages of any deal. Even in-house transactional lawyers, whose job it is to help close agreements, are usually excluded from the early and mid phases of sales and business development deals. In-house lawyers often find themselves stepping in only to take the deal through the necessary, but formalized and often somewhat adversarial, documentation process. Trust me on this one. A lot of lip service is paid to the idea that lawyers are integral to the business, but the reality does not live up to the talk. All of this is unfortunate because it means that we internal business lawyers are typically not set up to understand the human context of the deals we work on.
In-house lawyers who do not work on sales and business development deals have it even worse. They have skant exposure to customers at all. They may not need to have that customer-facing work in order to succeed perfectly well within the legal department, providing valuable service to the company. But I contend that every lawyer in a corporation, from securities lawyers to patent lawyers to litigators to human resource specialists and general counsel cannot rise the the level of leading executive without having represented a the company's products and without having built personal relationships with people who are customers and potential strategic partners.
So what can be done to break down this roadblock?
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2 comments:
Bob, you raise an important topic for in-house lawyers of all levels, not just entry level. I agree with the theme of your post that lawyers should strive to be an integral part of the business and must find ways to make themselves valuable. However, I think there are some pragmatic limitations to this idea that ultimately require lawyers to ask themselves: do I want to be a lawyer or business person? Let me explain.
In my experience, several aspects of the infrastructure of a job or company will determine where on the spectrum between pure law and pure business a lawyer operates. For example:
-some companies have a culture of job rotation - a sales or litigation attorney might naturally flow to a product role with no internal barriers, or even with internal encouragement
-some companies have a culture of making legal expertise a business value in itself - the legal team can "promote" business models or be industry thought leaders in support of company objectives
-larger entities with larger legal departments typically require more specialized services from each individual, whereas small startup types require "Renaissance" lawyers
-the nature of work might be inherently limiting - being chief lawyer for a shrinkwrap software product might have little customer or supplier exposure, whereas overseeing a hardware group might have many supplier contacts and overseeing an enterprise software group would be more closely tied to customers
-sophistication of internal clients matters too - seasoned leaders recognize legal issues are a necessary part of business and find ways to make it fit better
-lawyers are inherently limited in their business roles - they often don't have the expertise, or don't have the time because of pure legal duties, or need to maintain an arms length distance to serve as a company watchdog
All of this leads me to a couple of points to add to your basic conclusions:
-it's up to the lawyers to find a way to add business value while serving their primary legal duties, but lawyers sometimes get help from friendly internal clients
-as much as it might hurt to hear it, lawyers don't need (from a pure business perspective) to be involved with clients and customers at the initial stages, and that can sometimes be a significant detriment to a business relationship
-there are many lawyers who are perfectly happy doing the pure, grind-it-out lawyer work and don't need to seek fulfillment in the business arena beyond what they encounter in their day to day legal work.
Overall, however, I believe lawyers should strive to add whatever value they can and want to add by either finding a company and role that suits their specific goals, or in an extreme case, decide whether the legal business is the best place to focus their efforts (or try business development instead).
I think Gary and I are in agreement.
Here's a few clarifying comments from me. What I meant to be the primary hypothesis in my original post is: (a) To be an effective senior leader in a for-profit corporation, one must have significant experience working personally with customers and partners, (b) For many reasons, in-house lawyers typically do not have abundant opportunity to work in that context, and (c) As a result, any inhouse lawyer who wants to become an effective senior leader has a pretty tough road if he/she wants to ascend into such a leadership position while remaining in a counsel role. Even (and perhaps especially) a general counsel role.
It might help if I define "effective senior leader." As used here, "effective senior leader" is a small subset of executives. It is essentially the subset of senior executives who lead the company into new businesses, revenues and ways of doing things. Those that transcend mere management roles and achieve the status of game-changing leaders. I don't simply mean all people who have SVP or similar titles.
I think this fits with all of Gary's comments.
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