By Lloyd M. Johnson Jr., Chief Legal Executive LLC

For many years, CEOs looking to hire general counsel have looked beyond legal skills to find good, solid, strategic business counsel. That’s no longer enough.

The ability of the chief legal officer to manage the legal department and to stay one step ahead of both the C-suite and the board are the baseline requirements. But there are new factors to be dealt with. Institutional investors are increasingly impatient. CEOs and board members have more sophisticated expectations of the general counsel. And many sitting CEOs and general counsel are on the verge of retirement.

As a result, while CEOs looking for new general counsel are looking for top attorneys whose skills have been forged in a solid, forward-looking understanding of business and industry, they no longer expect that attorney to simply help guide the company along the right road. That attorney, instead, is expected to be the company’s mapmaker.

Given this development, it occurred to me that it would be useful – for general counsel, future general counsel and the CEOs to whom they report – to see just how we got here and where we’re likely to go in the years to come.

For help with that, I touched base with four executive search professionals who specialize in placing top legal officers: Cynthia Dow at Russell Reynolds, Julie Preng at Korn Ferry, Victoria Reese at Heidrick & Struggles and Paul Williams at Major, Lindsey & Africa. Williams, who was general counsel at Cardinal Health, a Fortune 500 healthcare services company, from 1995 to 2005, offered a unique from-the-trenches perspective.

The Captive Law Firm

Back some 40 years ago, the legal department wasn’t usually the first choice for the most ambitious attorneys, for whom law firm partnership was the brass ring. Though it offered less stress and fewer hours, the legal department seemed short on challenges, glamour, glory and competitive compensation.
Continue Reading What CEOs Want in a GC: Five stages in the evolution of the position to the key role it is today

By: Rees Morrison

Articles, consultants and conferences repeatedly praise data as an antidote to misimpressions and a supplement to experience. Most general counsel agree and, in their own fashion, rely on the data their department generates. Why, however, do some law department managers oppose investments in metrics as aids to their decision-making? Law departments store troves of data about matters, costs, law firms, time allocations and more, yet sometimes it goes unused, unvalued or even unrecognized.

While writing a book about management metrics for lawyers, analyzing such metrics and creating charts to convey findings, it occurred to me that we boosters of data-based decision-making can advance many arguments in favor of it, give examples, appeal to logic and history, but sometimes we make little headway. So I started collecting what I project to be the legitimately held beliefs of those who oppose enlisting data for decisions. Let’s refer to those beliefs as “objections.”

As the number of objections grew, a taxonomy drawn from several disciplines differentiated and grouped them. Here are the six disciplines and a thumbnail definition that guided assigning objections to them.

Anthropology: tribal mores and the culture of a law firm

Biology: primal fears from…
Continue Reading Just Say No to No: Be able to counter any objections to using data analytics in management decisions

Interview with Damien Atkins, Panasonic Corporation of North America

Rapid turnover in the C-suite, full-blown proxy fights, merging business cultures – Panasonic’s GC Damien Atkins has borne witness to it all. He discusses his M&A successes, and one pivotal failure, along with his plans for Panasonic’s in-house operations and how to face global compliance concerns. His remarks have been edited for length and style.

MCC: Congratulations on being included in the list of the “Top 100 Most Influential Blacks in Corporate America” by “Savoy.”    I understand the magazine received over 500 nominations.

Atkins: Thank you. It was particularly gratifying because it recognizes African-Americans who not only have made an impact on corporate America but who have also contributed to the betterment of their communities.

MCC: Tell us a little about yourself and your background.

Atkins: I’m originally from Oakland, California. My father joined the Foreign Service when I was young, so a lot of my boyhood years were spent in Ecuador, Panama and a number of other countries. After graduating from Banneker High School in Washington, D.C., I received a B.A. from Stanford, then moved back east to attend NYU law school.Continue Reading Change is More Than Just Talk at Panasonic: Creating a Culture of Compliance and Collaboration

By: Rees Morrison

This article explains how you can predict the amount a company’s law department spends on outside counsel based on the revenue of the company. Such a prediction can be useful for law firms, for example, when estimating how much of a given company’s expenditures the firm receives (the so-called share of wallet) or when proposing additional work (share of future wallet). For law departments, they might want to bootstrap a comparative analysis of their own spending against competitors who will not divulge proprietary information.

To explain how we make these predictions, we draw on data from the benchmark surveys conducted during the past five years by General Counsel Metrics, LLC. Specifically, the data set covers the outside legal expenditures and revenue for 145 submissions by 105 different law departments in the energy or utilities industries (the power industry, when grouped together). Collectively, the companies reported 2,916 lawyers and $670 billion in revenue; 89 of them are U.S. companies, 33 are Canadian and seven are British.

To predict spending on law firms (and the small portion on other service providers), we use a powerful statistical tool called linear regression. Regression predicts the value of a response …
Continue Reading Using Stats to Predict Outside Legal Spending

By: Lloyd M. Johnson Jr.

When thinking about transforming the legal department into a strategic partner for the business, it helps to see it as a journey rather than an overnight change. And Nancy Jessen, senior vice president of Legal Business Solutions at UnitedLex, breaks that journey down into four increasingly sophisticated steps.

Jessen explains that law departments need to evolve from simply providing substantive legal knowledge to having business acumen; to efficiently and effectively providing value-added services to the business; and providing corporate leadership and contributing to company strategy and success.

If a law department is to complete this journey, the people who make up the department have to evolve along that same continuum. That is, they need to change. And as anyone who has worked to transform an organization will tell you, people’s resistance to change is often the biggest obstacle along the way. In reality, people don’t dramatically change the way they think and work just because their boss announces that they should. So it is up to the general counsel to foster, encourage and drive that change.

The question is, how do you do that? Carey O’Connor, senior vice president,
general counsel and secretary at…
Continue Reading Tackling the Human Element in Transformation: Nothing will change until your people do