How companies expect their lawyers to advise them differs among companies. If you’re lucky, you work among people who appreciate and value lawyers for both their legal advice and their business sensibilities. (And if you’re really lucky, among people who are strangely okay with you blogging on a gossipy legal news site.) Business people who listen to your legal and business advice may respect that you work across several business units and get to see stuff that the individual groups don’t. Or they may just blindly trust you. That works too (for you).
At other companies, business people just want the in-house lawyer to stay focused on talking about legal issues and only legal issues, and don’t want to hear about any of the non-legal perspectives the lawyer may have to offer. And of course, there are other business people who don’t even really care for listening to any of the legal stuff (this may pose a bit of a problem if lawsuits or jail are some of the things they are interested in avoiding).
To be fair, the level of appreciation that business people have for their counsel’s advice, whether legal or non-legal, depends a lot on the individual lawyer’s capabilities….
The ideal business environment is collaborative and team-work oriented. The ability to be creative and adaptable is highly valued and important for the success of most companies. So yeah, we lawyers are kind of screwed from the get go. But never fear! With experience, even we who colored inside the lines at six weeks of age can learn to think out of the box! (Or at least appear to be trying to cooperate with others.)
According to In-house Lawyering 101, the following is not a satisfactory response:
View the Original article
