“So, What’s Your Job for the Summer?” What a Lawyer Can Learn from Diane Court.

An element of providing quality legal advice timely is understanding the business objective. 

In the movie Say Anything, the female lead character, Diane Court, asks Lloyd Dobler a simple question – “So, what’s your job this summer.”  It’s a simple, direct question.  It generates a simple direct response.  “Job? Being a great date.”   

It is simple to ask the business partner and understand “What’s your job this summer?”  Or this quarter.  Or this year. 

Lawyers often jump right into being a lawyer and forget to look up, touch base with the business, and make sure they are aligned with the businessperson’s job for the summer, the quarter, or the year.  Sometimes, the lawyer assumes they know (and we know what happens with assumptions).  Sometimes, the lawyer asked once but hasn’t asked often enough to understand that the business strategy or objectives have changed.

How to get started?  My team of in-house lawyers called their internal customers and ask six basic questions that we modified from Kimberly Janson book, Demystifying Talent Management (2015).

•  What are your objectives in the next year in your job?
•  What are you being held accountable for in the next year?
•  How can I, as the lawyer working with you, help you meet these objectives mentioned in response to questions 1 and 2?
• What do you need more of from me as the lawyer working with you?
• What do you need less of from me as the lawyer working with you?
• If, at the end of the year, you were to rank me (a lawyer) as your most valuable partner in meeting your objectives, what would have happened during the year to justify that ranking?

Would you like help to discover ways to help your team to ask the right questions to help better understand the business they support?  Let’s talk.

The Four Pillars of an In-House Law Department

Why do companies have their own law departments?  It is an important question for leaders of law departments to ask themselves and their teams.  It is an important question for in-house or want-to-be in-house lawyers to understand.  However, it is a question that is not asked nearly enough.

Do a quick Google search for why companies have law departments.  You will find legal websites that say various versions of “to provide preventative legal management,” “to help the business avoid costly mistakes,” or to avoid punitive impacts of decisions made without legal counsel.”  These answers are framed from a risk mitigation or risk elimination perspective.

You will also find websites that approach the question from the business’s side.  They say things like “be a trusted partner to the business,” “help the business understand legal risks as we make decisions,” “be a key resource,” and “help create parameters within which the business can operate.”

In conversations with lots of chief legal officers and general counsel as well as business people who rely on their law departments, the aims of an in-house law department distill down to about four pillars:

·   Quality legal advice timely. 

·    Position the business for positive outcomes. 

·    Develop people. 

·    Cost effectiveness.

Need some help thinking about the application of these pillars to your law department?  Watch for more posts.  And, second, let’s talk.