Rising Stars for 2014 – Getting there

As the in-house profession has swelled in size and status in recent years the competition to secure a small number of high status senior roles has intensified. Legal Business asks what it takes to become a Rising Star when the bar keeps rising

What does it take to get ahead in the legal team of a major company? It seems an obvious enough question but despite the well-documented expansion of the in-house profession over the last 20 years, there is relatively little material on the career track for the ambitious in-house counsel.

That is an informational vacuum that a rapidly expanding group of young lawyers – to say nothing of their general counsel (GC) managers – are moving to quickly fill, befitting an age in which many large public companies have built legal teams to rival small and medium-sized law firms in complexity.

But the reality is that the specific challenges facing ambitious corporate counsel can be far more daunting than the boosterish view of the in-house life increasingly propagated in the legal community would suggest. Standing out from the crowd has become harder given the striking growth of the commerce and industry sector, while the growing ranks of well-trained, battle-hardened and ambitious mid-level associates from leading law firms looking to enter the field have raised expectations.

By a similar token the blurring and shifting demands made of in-house counsel – having strayed further from the original conception of contract review, a link with private practice and narrow deal completion support – means it is harder to work out what is demanded of the aspiring general counsel of tomorrow.

As Neil Laventure, assistant GC at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and one of our Rising Stars for 2014, puts it: ‘The roles are becoming more demanding: there’s lots of travelling, a real mix of high-profile strategic work and lower level day-to-day stuff, as well as managing people and developing talent, which is now seen as a massive priority. You’ve got to juggle all these things, along with external legal spend, and knowing how to prioritise when you’re busy.’

And on top of greater commercial expectations, in-house counsel are still expected to maintain the traditional ‘broad church’ legal grasp that makes them if not exactly master of all legal trades, then not far off. Indeed, even judged purely on your black letters, most GCs contend that the influx of talent from private practice has meant that the technical bar has continued to rise, even as in-house counsel are expected to wear their lawyerly role lightly.

‘The skills that you need to be a brilliant lawyer in-house are the same as they’ve always been,’ says Ed Smith, UK GC of Telefonica. ‘You need intelligence, great training and to be a driven individual. What’s different compared to a decade ago is that the competition has increased. Now a greater proportion of high-quality lawyers are attracted to in-house as a deliberate career choice and the quality is rising.’

So what does it take to mark yourself as on the fast track, be it as a future group GC or the kind of modern lawyer who could credibly move into a desirable commercial or managerial role outside the legal function?

As anyone who has applied for a job before will know, a good CV will sell its owner on three main categories: knowledge/qualifications, experience and core qualities. Excellence in all three is required, but within those areas, we asked GCs, private practice, specialist recruiters and our Rising Stars for their take on what it takes to get ahead.

Escaping the box

An obvious initial point to note is that, while there has been a clear trend for in-house legal teams at bluechips to build up specialist skillsets which would have been reserved for law firms five or ten years ago, by consensus the typical promotion-track lawyer is not usually identified with overly-narrow legal niches.

In essence, across-the-board technical grasp is still prized most highly, ideally alongside flexibility and perspective in abundance. And given the sustained global increase in the level and complexity of new legislation and regulation, maintaining that effective ‘aerial view’ is becoming more challenging by the year.

‘You need a general understanding of pretty much all laws and regulations that affect your business,’ argues Andrew Winterton, GC at easyJet. ‘Legal departments nowadays can be more akin to law firms where you have specialist roles, but I’ve never been in a department where people don’t have a general understanding of pretty much everything. If you go into senior management only understanding one thing, like asset finance or corporate governance, then you’ll be missing the big picture.’

‘We are not looking for the world’s greatest expert, we can buy them in,’ says Anthony Inglese, who retired from his role as GC of HM Revenue & Customs in January. ‘What we need is someone who knows how the government machine works, how legislation is put together and how litigation works, along with the prospects of something holding up in court.’

Jeremy Cross, GC of energy services company Anesco, argues that, especially in smaller in-house departments – where you may be required to hold your own in a room full of external legal advisers who are specialists in their fields – the ambitious in-house lawyer must be prepared to keep on top of a formidable range of law.

‘Specialisms are too restrictive these days. When you sit down with a contract it will never be purely property or corporate, there will always be aspects of everything in there. You might face a table of specialist partners, for example, a project finance partner, a property partner, and a tax partner, and you have to be all of those things in one person to be able to liaise with them and negotiate a deal. It’s funny what you dig up in those times,’ says Cross.

The awkward reality for in-house counsel is that employers in some regards have come to want their cake and eat it: there is more expectation of specialist knowledge across a range of interlocking disciplines, but unless that specialism is core to the company, it is range and flexibility that marks out the GCs of tomorrow. Indeed, there can be an active distrust of the narrow specialist.

Upwardly mobile, literally

The aversion to specialism comes largely due to the greater expectations that in-house counsel will have a strong instinctive feel for the dynamics, office politics and profit drivers of the business as a whole.

An in-depth understanding of the business you work in is fundamental, no matter the sector you are in, argues RPC managing partner Jonathan Watmough. ‘In order to be able to advise people across the business properly – whether in HR or marketing – you have to understand the commercial context in which they are operating.’

‘If you have a view across the business, the job gets more interesting,’ says group legal director at Virgin Management, Robert Blok. ‘It can also be good to get involved on the commercial side of the business. For example, I sit on the board of various companies. This can allow you to develop people at a more senior level in legal teams which may in turn allow those at a more junior level to have more responsibility, enabling their development.’

Kirsty Cooper, group GC and company secretary at Aviva, gives her take: ‘One of my lawyers who has a mathematics degree was saying: “Actually I would like to go into actuarial risk, what do you think?” I said: “Great, you’re thinking outside the box, let me go and speak to the chief actuary and see if there’s something you can be doing.” That makes him more useful to the business, but also, from my perspective, it keeps him enthusiastic and motivated about working for Aviva.’

To this end, there is a pronounced trend among major companies to actively move the most promising legal talent around. This can happen in many contexts, including defined executive training schemes, secondments, transfers to foreign offices or moves to work more directly with revenue-generating teams.

However it is achieved, the end result is the same: fostering the much vaunted commercialism that everyone agrees marks out the stars from the solid earth-bound staffers.

General Electric’s UK and European transactions GC, Benedict O’Halloran, says: ‘You come in as a lawyer but what you become is an executive with a legal background. It’s about being part of a team of executives working to achieve objectives.

‘You’ve got to go beyond being a lawyer to understand the commercial and strategic issues in a business. You’ve got to understand accounting, how transactions impact business performance, and be able to provide advice that gets to the commercial bottom line by including those things in your thinking as well as legal analysis.’

Telefonica’s Smith picks up the theme: ‘The principal thing general counsel ought to do to improve the prospects of mid-rank lawyers is encourage them to take career decisions early that provide them with the greatest variety of experiences within the business.’

Paul Newton, chief legal officer at Bupa, strikes a similar note, arguing that one of the major qualities that makes a young lawyer stand out is an openness to new challenges, rather than retreating to their comfort zone. ‘This is someone with a broad international mindset and what we would call a breakthrough mentality – someone who is very open to new thinking. All of these things are very difficult to assess sometimes. But you know when it’s there or not and you have to probe a little bit to discover if what’s being presented is the genuine article.’

The next step is to apply that to the wider ambitions and values of the organisation. ‘What commerciality means is understanding the value rather than its price,’ says easyJet’s Winterton. ‘The biggest difference between private practice and in-house is that in private practice you go through things clause-by-clause, point-by-point, whereas in-house, it’s about taking a step back and thinking “Right, what are we trying to achieve here?”’

‘As part of that you need to be a bigger risk-taker. You need to understand what is acceptable risk for your company in all areas. People don’t necessarily want you to approve how they want to do something, but instead to approve what they’re trying to do,’ adds Winterton. ‘How you get there is mere detail.’

And if moving around helps in-house counsel to gain commercial insight into the wider fundamentals of a large company, it also provides a chance to build their experience in another crucial area: presentation skills.

Forcing lawyers to gain more contact with staff outside their area is agreed to foster their ability to communicate across the business, an obvious asset for anyone working in a company in which law is a support function.

Chris Cayley, managing director for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) at recruiter Laurence Simons, comments: ‘Technical ability is often taken as read so it’s the ability to make it user-friendly and to apply it with simplicity, clarity and commerciality that really counts.

‘The key for any business is that they have a lawyer who will present them with commercial solutions and will be a facilitator. It’s about identifying risk, a commercial approach to risk and how that is presented.’

Honing such people skills is, of course, also important in helping lawyers to build networks and relationships beyond the legal function that can help facilitate promotions. ‘It all comes down to trust – everything springs from that,’ says Watmough. ‘Politics comes into it too. The most successful GCs in my experience have been very good at building strong relationships with the right people at the right time.’

The formal approach

The good news for aspiring GCs is that many large companies have formal training and development initiatives that are open to the in-house legal team. Even when there is less formal training, the majority of GCs canvassed for this piece argue that development and assessment programmes on offer for in-house counsel have progressed substantially in recent years.

BAE Systems, for example, has a clearly defined and detailed ‘matrix’ by which its junior lawyers are assessed and managed from two years’ post-qualification experience up to GC. Likewise, General Electric has a wide range of training programmes open to lawyers covering a range of commercial and financial disciplines.

‘The best experience is just being exposed to the business on the cutting edge as much as possible,’ says Laventure, who spent time with the field sales team at GSK, selling Ribena and Lucozade to newsagents.

‘It’s about getting to know clients really well, chipping in and doing things which aren’t classically part of the lawyer’s role. I helped out on the UK leadership team last year, working on the reward programme for employees who had performed outstandingly, which gave me a breadth of experience contributing in a different way.’

For Theeba Ragunathan, another of our 2014 Rising Stars and director and head of legal services at Spanish construction group Dragados, it was about putting herself forward as the first lawyer to be involved in Carillion’s business-wide leadership programme during her seven years there prior to joining Dragados.

‘I was supported by a psychologist and an in-house job coach. I was lucky enough to have former GC, now chief executive of Carillion, Richard Howson, along with the HR director and an external mentor at Slaughter and May.

‘As part of the scheme, I did a six-month secondment to Business in the Community looking at the King’s Cross development programme, which was meant to take me completely out of my comfort zone. I was sitting on the panel of key contractors which had been set up with the likes of Argent and Network Rail, which had both won a development piece there.

‘We then had to each do a strategic programme – mine was directly sourcing construction materials from India. There were so many different elements to it and it didn’t just stop there, it created so many opportunities in terms of networking in the organisation, and you get yourself known to the executive committee,’ says Ragunathan.

With regard to formal training there is also considerable support for the value in lawyers gaining an MBA since it not only allows them to stand out against peers but provides a solid grounding in finance and company analysis.

Stephen Pearson, GC at Virgin Money, argues that an MBA can count for more than experience at a top City firm in terms of making candidates stand out in a corporate context.

‘I employed a partner from a little-known law firm, who had realised that he was going to get very bored with his day job so had thrown himself into an MBA and extra-curricular activity. It demonstrated a real interest and hunger to find out about business. Employing him was a bit of a gamble but it paid off.’

The ‘X Factor’

While there is agreement that there are clear steps and ways to build your CV, an important point for aspiring lawyers is just because you may be working in a large company with a wealth of development programmes, arguably the most important factor for up-and-coming counsel is that they push themselves forward.

Funke Abimbola, managing counsel for UK and Ireland at Roche, puts the point forcefully: ‘Individuals [should] take ownership of their own personal development. It’s not for your manager to develop you – that’s a fallacy, it doesn’t work that way. You need to be clear in your own mind about how you see yourself developing and come to your manager with that and we can discuss how we can support that and provide opportunities.’

Picking up this point, the consensus view among veteran GCs is that, while many skills can be taught and developed, companies still often look for that spark of magic, call it leadership, drive, charisma or presence.

‘The thing I look for above everything else is attitude and leadership potential. There’s a lot that you regard as just general hygiene, the X Factor that we’re looking for is leadership,’ says Bupa’s Newton.

‘We – and I speak for the CEO as well as myself – want someone who will own the legal risks, as well as the affairs of the organisation as a whole, and who will provide input and challenge across the whole business. What we need is lawyers who lead not just as lawyers but as broad-based leaders as part of the executive team, who are able to contribute to discussions and debates on broad-based business issues, someone who the organisation would look to as a leader.’

Signs of such leadership qualities can be seen early on, says Inglese. ‘I’m not talking about a charismatic leader who gets up in front of 5,000 people and stirs them, but as a lawyer, even in the first week, if you’re giving advice that the client doesn’t quite want to hear, or if you’re trying to persuade your client that they might need to do further work or development of options, then you’re showing leadership already.’

For Ragunathan, this essential quality is to identify the challenges in a business and prove yourself ready to take the lead on the next major project to address them.

‘It’s about trying to get to the meatiest of the issues and allowing yourself to go through the development so that you’re ready to take on the big projects and be given the kudos to take the legal lead on something.’

Ragunathan concludes: ‘You’ve got to have fire in your belly, self-belief, and to be vocal about it. Former GC, now chief executive of Carillion Richard Howson, said to me six or seven years ago: “I want to be CEO. You’ve got to be vocal about what you want, and just go for it.”’ LB

francesca.fanshawe@legalease.co.uk