Welcome to Legal Business’ second annual GC Power List, which follows up on our successful launch last year. While we already knew we wanted the Power List to be an ongoing strand for Legal Business and its sister title The In-House Lawyer, reflecting the growing clout of in-house lawyers, attentive readers will note a shift in format from 2013. Since we didn’t feel the most influential senior general counsel (GC) would materially change in the space of 12 months, we decided it would be more worthwhile to this year focus on the rising stars of in-house legal.
The aim is to highlight those standout performers coming into their own at major companies, typically but not exclusively during their 30s – the GCs of tomorrow if you like. Given the relatively flat nature of the career structure below group GC level and the increasing breadth of the UK in-house profession, identifying and then narrowing down the field to 100 was obviously going to prove more challenging than highlighting a group of GCs who had already climbed to the top of their ladder.
Our research, which was led by news editor Caroline Hill and reporters Francesca Fanshawe and Sarah Downey, went through several stages, beginning with the online collection of hundreds of individual nominations before we moved to directly canvassing senior figures in the profession. Inevitably, pulling together such a list is not an exact science once you go beyond the easy-to-identify standout chief legal officers at major companies, but the breadth of nominations and weeks of research among our established contact base means we feel we’ve made a very credible start on which to build in future.
To widen the scope of the project, we have also built on the core Power List itself to solicit commentary on the changing demands made of up-and-coming in-house counsel and to provide analysis of how the career outlook and opportunities of working with major corporates are evolving. To keep continuity with last year’s report and the 100 senior GCs we highlighted in 2013, this group was again canvassed for their input on the best mid-level talent on offer and how they as GCs are looking to develop more of this breed.
We hope the result is a worthwhile read and underlines our ongoing commitment at Legal Business to improve our engagement and relevance to the in-house community. The Power List will return in 2015, but we’ll keep updating the research to keep it fresh for our readers.
The aim is to highlight those standout performers coming into their own at major companies – the GCs of tomorrow if you like.
Alex Novarese
Editor-in-chief
Legal Business