Jelena Tosic, José Izquierdo and Laura Woodfine-Jones, writing for the ACC’s Corporate Counsel Now, share what an ACC Europe roundtable said when asked who would notice if legal disappeared tomorrow. The answers went well beyond legal advice: legal as safety net, enabler and the function that sees across the company. Their measures of legal department value lean on good governance, templates and escalation triggers, not money saved.
The useful bit for anyone eyeing the next rung: business understanding beats technical brilliance, and being visible beats being right in an ivory tower. We covered the legal department value gap with the C-suite last week, and our guide to being a good in-house lawyer covers how to show it. Lawyers who can are hiring targets on our in-house counsel jobs page.
As the authors put it: “Attendees also agreed that counting the hours required to solve an issue is not an effective way to measure impact.”
Read: Who Would Notice if Legal Disappeared Tomorrow? at ACC Corporate Counsel Now