The misperception of in-house lawyers and their legal teams as ‘business prevention units’, as one business leader refered to them earlier this year, must now surely have been corrected. A look at this issue’s ALB/Jun He Inhouse Top 25, a snapshot of the region’s most dynamic corporate counsel, provides ample proof that the role successful in-house lawyers play today is as commercial as it is legal.
The modern in-house legal department – taking regulatory, compliance and purely legal matters in its stride – acts as a business facilitation unit, helping its company bring complex transactions to completion with all the right boxes ticked. But while the new-look in-house legal team boasts a relevance and value to the business that many chief executive officers would argue has increased exponentially, the fact that things have changed so much, in many cases over just 10 or 15 years, means it also faces a unique set of challenges.
As corporate lawyers get ever closer to the executive, and many sit on boards and share the performance-based incentives of their fellow board members, the chances grow of the profession’s most important weapon – independence – being compromised. The 25 corporate counsel profiled in this issue of ALB have all developed programs to address this fundamental challenge as well as the many others they face.
The message for law firms is clear. They need to be acutely aware of the rarefied, prickly, exacting new atmosphere in which their clients operate, and should adjust the nature of their counsel accordingly.
As one of the featured GCs noted, external lawyers must work “as if they were in-house counsel.”
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The modern in-house legal department – taking regulatory, compliance and purely legal matters in its stride – acts as a business facilitation unit, helping its company bring complex transactions to completion with all the right boxes ticked