What makes a great corporate legal team? It is a question general counsel (GCs) surprisingly often struggle to answer. This lack of familiarity with the stock definitions of management theory should not be interpreted as a sign of operational incompetence, though.
‘The most common attribute any company looks for when hiring a GC is the ability to manage and lead a team,’ says Siobhán Lewington, managing director of legal recruitment boutique Fox Rodney Search. ‘The interview process is designed to highlight those skills and it is all but impossible to become head of a legal department now without an innate flair for teambuilding.’
The teams featured in this year’s GC Powerlist highlight the level of managerial development that has entered the legal function, through trial and error and the influx of a lot of bright people over the last decade, more than leadership theory. One indication of that sophistication is the growing number of senior business service professionals highlighted by GCs as leading figures within their teams. Jack Diggle, head of Elevate’s global legal consulting practice, sees this as a shift that will increasingly define the industry.
‘Legal teams have always been idiosyncratic in their structure. The finance department of any large corporation will have around 10% of its staff in an operations layer that focuses on innovation, transformation and improvement. Legal historically never had that layer – it just had lawyers. The benchmark of maturity was having a few administrative staff.’ Diggle sees things changing: ‘Over the last five years, operations professionals have started to enter legal teams and manage their processes. This has been accelerating rapidly over the past 18 months and will reach a tipping point soon.’
The Corporate Legal Operations Consortium, better known as CLOC, has been the chief proselytiser. Officially launched in 2016, the San Francisco-based group already counts around a quarter of the Fortune 500 among its membership in the US. In early 2018, CLOC held its inaugural conference for the group’s European chapter in London.
Its European president, deputy legal counsel for worldwide legal operations at cloud computing provider VMware, Áine Lyons, has a longstanding interest in the field. ‘When I first began studying the processes and operations underpinning a legal function, I realised just how much I had overlooked by thinking about it from a lawyer’s perspective. Many of the techniques that improve a department’s performance require no legal insight, though having a legal background certainly helped me command credibility in discussions with external counsel.’
Lyons was also at something of an advantage in working at VMware. ‘As a business we have some of the most advanced sourcing processes in the market and our own suite of cloud-based applications to draw on. But I always emphasise that the legal operations playbook can work for any company. You don’t need to have a tech-heavy structure to get the benefits.’
‘When I speak to other GCs about my team, they are surprised. They realise there are a lot of benefits to bringing in non-legal skills.’
Carolyn Jameson, Skyscanner
Maria Passemard, head of legal projects at the John Lewis Partnership, is a prime example. Over the last two years, Passemard has reorganised the retailer’s legal function and introduced a number of technologies, including DocuSign and Riverview Law’s artificial intelligence platform, Kim. ‘Working in an operations role within a fairly traditional business has shown me just how much we can accomplish by turning tacit, black-letter law into a business process,’ she notes. ‘Reducing lawyers’ involvement in the commercial contracting process is something any legal team can look at.’
The growth of legal ops was particularly evident in the financial services teams profiled this year. Alison Gaskins, chief of staff to Barclays group GC Bob Hoyt, is cited as one of the standout figures. Gaskins now works alongside head of legal operations Jon Doyle, a former wing commander in the Royal Air Force who began his career at Barclays as programme manager in the credit derivatives function. The Aviva team was also cited for the influential roles played by non-legal staff, such as business manager Gordon Mead.
In spite of its growing prominence, the UK’s legal ops scene remains a close-knit community. Familiar figures on the circuit include Mo Ajaz, group head of legal operational excellence at National Grid; Klaas Evelein, global legal operations director at Unilever; and Claire Debney, director of legal strategy and chief of staff at Shire. Vodafone is often cited as one of the most enthusiastic teams for empowering business services thanks to figures like Steven Jebb, who heads the company’s innovation and change strategy and has been re-examining its contracting models alongside Kerry Phillip, who has been helping to implement Riverview’s Kim.
‘Many of today’s graduates will go on to work in a corporate legal team and if the universities are not teaching the skills they need, it will fall on GCs to educate them.’
Claire Debney, Shire
The wider impact of this on legal teams is less certain. As one senior figure in the legal ops community notes: ‘In most companies you will struggle to match the salary of a mid-level in-house lawyer, which is ironic since we are being asked to help reduce the legal spend.’
It would also be wrong to see the absence of operations as a sign of a poorly-structured team. Legal & General’s Geoffrey Timms comments: ‘You have to be careful not to create an added layer of bureaucracy for the sake of it. We have introduced technology where it is appropriate, but unless you’ve got a vast claims portfolio or some other commoditisable work sitting around, it makes more sense to build a team that excels in the more intuitive and intelligent aspects of legal work.’
Knowing how and when to use technology is an increasingly insistent theme for legal teams. ‘We’ve looked at about 90% of the contract management tools out there,’ says ZPG GC Ned Staple. ‘The issue is, you don’t want to make the investment several times. The technology itself can be very expensive, but the bigger cost comes in the time it takes you to familiarise the team with it.’
The high cost of legal technology has encouraged lawyers to develop their own solutions. Rob Green, legal director and data privacy director at Canon Europe, worked with lawyers across the company to build a self-service portal. ‘We initially decided to go down this route because the cost of third-party systems was too high, but the end product works as well as anything we could have bought in,’ comments Green. ‘Sitting down as a team, and thinking about what we do and how we do it, was a great way to refocus minds on the role we play in the business. I would encourage others to look at developing their own software before turning to external providers.’
Finding lawyers capable of developing software is likely to be the biggest obstacle GCs face here. Skyscanner GC Carolyn Jameson has sought to bring a diverse skillset to the team, though she says it remains unusual. ‘When I speak to other GCs about my team they tend to be surprised. They realise that there are a lot of benefits to bringing non-legal skills into the team, but it does not yet appear to be a big part of wider recruitment strategy, largely because these are the hardest skills to find in the market.’
‘The most common attribute any company looks for when hiring a GC is the ability to manage and lead a team.’
Siobhán Lewington, Fox Rodney Search
Edinburgh’s rich tech scene has helped Jameson bring in young lawyers such as Anoop Joshi, a former software developer at CodeBase, and fellow coder Craig McIntyre, who completed his training contract with Skyscanner a year ago. But, she adds, GCs are facing increased competition from law firms in the scramble to find lawyers with a background in data law, cyber security and IT.
Finally, this year’s Powerlist shows a growing interest in developing in-house career paths. Canon, GSK Consumer Healthcare and Shire all stood out as notable examples of teams that have looked to address the skills gap between private practice and in-house.
Shire’s Debney, who is currently implementing a transformation project dubbed POD (for people, operations and development), comments: ‘Many of today’s graduates will go on to work in a corporate legal team and if the universities are not teaching the skills they need to thrive, it will fall on GCs to educate them.’ Canon’s Green adds: ‘There are a lot of things you don’t know when you move in-house. Often, when someone is deemed to be failing in a role, it is because they are not aware of tacit expectations. [In-house roles are] so fluid now, and touch on so many things outside the law, that we need to really rethink how we go about recruiting and training the next generation.’
All of which suggests that, however slowly, the market is shifting. As ZPG’s Staple concludes: ‘Legal is not immune to change; it just hasn’t had to change for a number of years. In many ways it is a bonkers, upside-down market. The true sign of a strong legal team is its ability to change that.’
Additional reporting by Hamish McNicol and Tom Baker.