14 Ways to Prepare for Your First General Counsel Role

Broad-based experience is key for most general counsel roles. To gain experience in new fields of law, seek out projects that will give you exposure to new arenas. Don’t shy away from taking on things you haven’t done before, and if there’s a new field of law developing, offer to become your company’s expert on it.

To be successful as a chief legal officer or general counsel, you must understand how your company operates and makes money. You may find it helpful to attend as many business meetings as possible, even if legal issues are not being discussed. When you attend these business meetings, you have an opportunity to learn business plans, goals, visions, and challenges.

This is the biggest gap for many new general counsel (though it’s probably also the “easiest” part of the GC job to figure out). If you are reporting to a general counsel at a large company, consider asking for responsibility over a board committee, or two. If that’s not possible, consider joining nonprofits' boards to gain some experience in a boardroom.   

Senior managers want to view their chief legal officer as a business partner, not as a roadblock. Earning the trust of your peers is crucial to ensuring that they come to you with important matters, so make sure they know that you are aligned with their business goals. You may also find it helpful if everyone at the company has respect for you, and respect is often mutual, so be sure to be respectful to everyone at all levels within the organization.    

If you are promoted internally, you may find that, overnight, your former peers will become your direct reports. Some of them may also be your friends, and they may have been hoping to receive the promotion that you earned instead of them, which may lead to some resentment. You will need to figure out a way to get comfortable managing your former peers/colleagues/friends, and that requires a lot of confidence.

Surround yourself with people you trust to advise you on various areas of law. Once you are the head of a legal department, you won’t have time to be in the weeds on all of your company’s legal matters, so make sure you know which members of your team you can trust to make recommendations about which matters can be handled internally, which should be outsourced, and which are significant enough to be outsourced to a top-tier firm with top-tier billing rates. 

For-profit companies are in business to make money. Risk is always required to make money. Most lawyers are trained to be risk averse, but remember that without risk there is often a limited upside potential.

The ACC Resource Library's Risk Tolerance Checklist is a good place to start.

When communicating with non-lawyers, you will be expected to get to the point quickly. Many attorneys started their legal careers as law firm associates, a role which often involves writing long memos with complicated legal analysis. Let go of your law firm associate mentality and focus instead on providing short answers to questions. Focus on writing one-sentence emails. One-word answers will likely be welcomed by many business managers. 

To become a successful GC, it’s helpful to learn multiple ways to avoid saying “no” to a business partner with an idea or proposal. As long as the proposal is not manifestly illegal, it’s great to be able to steer the conversation towards the likely outcomes or possible legal consequences of the proposal, or towards a discussion of whether or not the business can absorb the risk.   

Take advantage of every opportunity to make yourself visible to your business managers. Conduct trainings, use yourself as a speaker/participant in training videos, and make sure to spend time every week walking the hallways of your office. The more you are seen and heard by the business units, the more they will get used to seeing you and working with you.

 Become a brand ambassador for the company. Take responsibility for the success of your business overall, not just the success of your department. Pursue initiatives that will benefit the company even if they are outside your typical scope of responsibility. When you operate with an owner-mindset, that will be noticed by the CEO and other members of senior management, because they don’t see it from everyone in the organization.   

These employees are the backbone of the company. Of course, your relationships with the CEO and CFO are of utmost importance, but it’s also important that you are in touch with the workers who are not in executive or managerial positions but whose crucial work keeps the company running. If these employees aren’t happy, addressing their concerns may be more important for the company than many other matters on which the senior management team is focused. 

Lawyers are accustomed to excelling and succeeding, so your first instinct may be to “beat your budget” in your first year. But most seasoned GCs will tell you that there’s no benefit to beating your budget, because nobody is going to thank you for beating your budget. Also, the following year’s budget will be based on the current year’s expenses, so if you beat your budget, you likely will find a smaller budget allocated to you the next fiscal year. 

Some of the most successful CLOs make a point of responding to emails the same day they are received. That doesn’t mean they provide a substantive response the same day, but they do acknowledge receipt of the message and manage expectations regarding a timeline for a substantive response. Of course, things will come up that may keep you from meeting these timelines, but good communication and an explanation of the reason for delays will go a long way towards managing expectations.