Managing an expanded team
If you’ve been catapulted from the safety of a legal silo into the realm of department management, you’ll know that managing an in-house legal team can be a huge learning curve. But what if your department (and your remit) suddenly get a lot bigger?
Victor Topadze became group legal director at Russian classifieds business Avito in 2012. He saw his team grow from a four-person outfit to a 15-strong department in only two years, as the company transformed from the start-up it was in 2009 to the multibillion dollar company it is today. It was tough, he says, because of the speed of the changes in the business. ‘It’s not like anyone says “here’s a year to try and build a team.” Products and new functionality were added virtually every week, so it was a very demanding professional environment.’ What had previously been largely a generalist group had to be structured into teams of specialists focused on corporate and M&A, core business, contractual work and compliance issues. On top of masterminding the new structure, Topadze also now had to field the challenges thrown up by cross-functional projects, which created overlaps and grey areas of responsibility.
Marcus Lee has also seen a major shift in his department’s dynamic. In the five years that he has been general counsel at British television network Channel 5, his team has more than doubled in size, mainly due to an increase in responsibilities. When it comes to planning a new structure in the face of such expansion, he says, ‘you should have in the back of your mind how it would ideally look if you were designing it from scratch. Sometimes you inherit teams that have a particular history, but you have to constantly reassess whether those structures are still appropriate and relevant for the current business.’ Like Topadze, he advocates grouping team members according to their responsibilities. But this needn’t mean creating siloes. Channel 5 has moved some non-legal (but closely-connected) functions into the legal team, which has paid dividends in terms of efficiency. ‘We had a look at a couple of the process documents that were being created regularly by different parts of the business, and it was possible for me to see if there were any duplicated tasks there. I could also see if there were any process documents or update summaries that it might be useful for another part of the business to see. So you’re not increasing workload for anyone, but you are sharing knowledge and communicating a lot better,’ he says.
