Mark Le Blanc says leaders must expand their teams' skill sets and approach management anew
Shifting legal departments from cost centres to strategic centres should be consultants’ consuming objective in advising in-house leaders, says Marc Le Blanc, a former general counsel turned consultant at Toronto-based Simplex Legal LLP, affiliated with Epiq Global, one of the world’s largest alternative legal service providers.
“The goal, a very narrow one, is to leverage the value that exists in law departments and that is undervalued in many organizations,” explains Le Blanc, who leads Simplex’ Thrive Legal Law Department Advisory Services and has more than two decades of experience in the media industry at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and TVO, followed by stints in transportation and franchising.
Historically, companies have assessed law departments on their traditional focuses on risk mitigation, cost containment, legal task completion, and monitoring regulatory compliance.
“But in-house value is now also being assessed by the extent to which the lawyers contribute to the advancement of key organizational strategic objectives, similarly to what happens in finance, HR, IT, sales and marketing,” Le Blanc says. “This means that GCs and other law department leaders must expand their team’s skill sets and approach management anew.”
The key to effecting the law department’s expanded role, Le Blanc adds, is a deep understanding of business drivers, collaboration with company leadership, aligning the department’s priorities with organizational objectives, and implementing metrics-based performance evaluation.
Le Blanc’s views stem from his experience as GC of a large legacy broadcasting business that had to repurpose and rebuild the law department as the digital world changed the industry profoundly. The law department had not only to keep up but to transform.
“GCs have to get away from a perspective that focuses on improving their teams and move to a vision that embraces an active role in overall organization growth,” Le Blanc says. “The magic is to identify where legal can work with others to provide solutions and take ownership of the process.”
By way of example, Le Blanc notes that problems relating to privacy are often treated as the province of IT.
“But privacy is fraught with legal issues that can only be satisfactorily resolved by working with IT to identify where the organization stores data, how to manage it, and how to give access to it.”
While criticism of in-house counsel frequently labels them as “too slow” and “deal killers,” Le Blanc notes that automation is already speeding things up from a process perspective.
“Artificial intelligence will speed that up even more, not just by increasing profits through efficiency but as a potent agent of change. We’re already seeing super powerful tools with simple user interfaces that provide enormous benefits.”
Still, automation alone won’t allow law departments to escape the “deal killer” label.
“The real problem is that lawyers negotiate things that don’t matter,” Le Blanc says. “Contracts can be much less one-sided and still not change risk substantially. Keeping that in mind will shrink negotiation time and start deals off on a better footing.”
As it turns out, consultancies are evolving to change these realities and providing law departments with an expanding menu of tools.
One example is Australia-based Front Foot Law, an international consultancy providing cost-effective and accessible education and tools for the difficulties facing in-house lawyers, including having too much work, managing problematic client relationships and feeling undervalued by non-legal colleagues.
“Many courses that are available to deal with these issues are generally quite expensive and require people to obtain approval and budget for travelling and taking leave to do intensive courses,” says David Curtain, the company’s founder and director.
Front Foot instead offers affordable on-demand courses, including 10 legal operations modules relating to legal strategic planning, process improvement, data analytics, change management, knowledge management and implementing legal technology.
The courses come with live support from Curtain, who has 13 years of experience in-house, culminating his career as head of legal at a multinational energy company. An online community, live Q&A sessions, group mentoring and one-on-one legal operations coaching, provide additional support.
Ultimately, finding added organizational value for law departments should not be daunting.
“Value can be found,” Le Blanc says. “This is not rocket science.”
