Have you heard the one about the General Counsel with 50 lawyers, processing 300-plus matters a month, yet they still can’t get all the work done that the business wants? 

And no, this isn’t a joke.

It’s a genuine instance of something that’s increasingly common: namely, that today’s General Counsel are under relentless pressure to do more with less in ever shorter timeframes, which is simply not achievable.

So, what’s the way forward?

Putting legal work in order

To begin with, and in my experience, GCs can certainly do more with less if they’re supported by the right systems. But more than that, if they can acquire the capacity to do work in the right order, it ushers in a paradigm shift.

Because when you’re able to prioritize legal work to match the business’s strategic imperatives, you take the pressure off your lawyers, you achieve considerably more impact for the business, and you acquire a stronger bargaining position when asking for more resources. Let me explain more.

The disconnect

A core issue – and something I hear frequently when talking to General Counsels – is that the work undertaken by the legal department on behalf of the whole business, is in reality very often limited to bits of the business.

And sometimes only one part of the business.

Indeed, Legal’s workload rarely reflects the needs of the whole entity in all its complexity of subsidiaries, departments, business units and the brands they’re trying to grow. And that’s not great.

On top of that, all too often, Legal does work most promptly (and frequently) for whoever shouts loudest. This is irrespective of the genuine business case for, and priority of, that piece of work. It’s another problem.

Not only is Legal potentially wasting precious resources on things of lesser value. In addition, it won’t help you defend resource allocations and fight for more budget when you’re in front of the executive team. It needs to stop.

What GCs should cultivate instead is the capacity to connect every contract, every matter, and every task to the organization’s stated strategic targets. Have this tattooed on your hand: “Work without a strategic link has no executive value.”

Or … scrap the tattoo idea and instead look into a systems solution that automatically classifies work as high, medium or low priority based on its link to strategy and then let data drive the queue.

Strategic initiatives

How does that work in practice?

In a previous blog I outlined the process of transitioning data from unstructured to structured, via categorization and standardization to automation.

Among other things – like tackling bottlenecks and reducing cycle times – this can enable the business’s strategic initiatives for the next three to five years to be fed into a Legal work management prioritization system.

It may be that Legal agrees with the business on the five strategic brands that will be high priority for the next three years, as well as those that are medium and low priority. Each can have different SLAs attached.

It ensures that lawyers pick up what matters, not what’s brought to their attention by their favorite internal client or next-door department.

It furthermore ensures that if/when a brand owner complains to the CEO of a lack of service from Group Legal, one of two things happen. The General Counsel can either negotiate which existing priority to swap out; or Legal gets the additional resource necessary to service the needs of each brand owner in the necessary timeline. The third possibility is simply that the CEO handles the noise.

Articulated impact

Legal stands to gain a great deal when their work is aligned to business priorities. It ensures that work is ordered based on business impact and risk appetite. It ensures that demand and capacity can be proactively managed to avoid dramas. It means Legal can shed its ‘firefighting’ habit and instead become recognized across the whole organization as business enablers.

For General Counsels, it provides a cast iron rationale for the decisions made; and they can be taken transparently, in clear alignment with the overall business strategy.

It also gives General Counsels a structure for articulating Legal’s impact, using language the Executive understands and responds to. As such, connecting legal work to strategic initiatives is mission critical to growing both yourself and your team within the organization. Also, no joke.