In-house legal teams have become more sophisticated over the last 20 years but, according to many general counsel (GCs), the pressure to widen their skillsets over the next decade is intense.
For Pearson GC Bjarne Tellmann, the roundedness of the modern in-house lawyer starts with the training they receive, but he laments a hole in the market. He sends his trainees to receive mini-MBAs or ‘executive MBA-style training’ from a range of institutions, including Deloitte University. Oxford and Harvard also provide mini-MBAs.
Tellmann comments: ‘There’s a huge opportunity for a business school to do a legal MBA. We’re getting to the point where GCs are running their legal departments like CEOs, or they’re thinking about budget, strategy and culture. It’s much more about leadership and building a team.’
He is not the only GC placing more importance on lawyers getting a broader education. Royal Mail’s legal chief Maaike De Bie has established an internal training academy. ‘Instead of just training lawyers in law we focus on all different kinds of topics, such as management skills, networking and even meditating,’ she says.
But this approach has come from the top as well as the bottom: De Bie has overseen a radical shift in the make-up of her senior team since joining five years ago. She says: ‘We trained everyone to make sure they’re financially astute, so now people are fixed on getting the best value from external partners.’
Kirsty Cooper (pictured), GC and company secretary of Aviva, has a different training initiative for widening legal expertise. Launched this year and dubbed ‘Missions’, the programme sees small teams of six to eight people given a business problem to solve in eight weeks before presenting back to the legal leadership team. Cooper says Missions has ‘landed really well’ and ‘got the lawyers to think more like business people’. As part of the initiative, the lawyers also get support and mentorship from other people within the business. Aside from Missions, Aviva also sponsors anyone in the function who wants to undertake an MBA. Three lawyers are currently taking up the offer, with another three set to be sponsored.
In conjunction with the need for greater training is the need to coax lawyers out of silos. At Vodafone, legal chief Rosemary Martin is keen to ditch specialisms in favour of a team of generalists. ‘We’re going to get our lawyers to become more comfortable advising on things they currently don’t know much about. At the moment, we are organised into teams in specialist areas but we need to have our lawyers comfortable advising on anything.’
One of the key areas into which in-house lawyers are expected to branch out is in influencing the law rather than just reacting. Neil Murrin, GC of mobile ticketing app Trainline, has diverted considerable resources towards lobbying the government to improve transport infrastructure. ‘In the transport world, things have been done for a long time in a more analogue way. I’ve been talking to politicians over the last year about how great mobile ticketing can be.’ Likewise, Cooper has emphasised the need to influence legislation before it comes out. Her legal team has swelled from 320 to 360 as a result of this focus on public policy. She says: ‘Our public policy team has punched above its weight in terms of influencing legislation before it’s enacted.’ She says her team and the UK general insurance business were a ‘driving force’ behind the controversial ‘whiplash’ Civil Liability Bill, which raised the minimum claim threshold to £2,000 to ease the onslaught of false claims on insurers.
Telefónica GC Ed Smith feels the sophistication of in-house legal teams has plateaued in the last five years, but argues it is possible for there to be greater developments in the next decade. He concludes: ‘Businesses will employ more lawyers but not in the traditional sense. There will be many more lawyers operating outside their typical skillsets. The sort of people who trained in-house and then stepped out into non-legal roles. That will become normal.’