Sailing through a rough economy – Part 3

Walid Sowaidan, 3M

In the last edition of the three-part series, Walid Sowaidan shares his thoughts on efficient in-house legal budget management in a difficult economy.

Having discussedexternal counsel and in-house counsel cooperation as well as thoughts on meeting increasingly challenging internal client demands, our focus in this article is efficient management of the legal budget as a client expectation that gets more focus in difficult economic circumstances.

Today’s general counsel continues focusing on talent retention and development, while operating in a “do more with less” environment. Though that may appear to be adding up to challenges facing talent retention and talent development, a deeper lookrevealsan opportunity to leverage budget limitations to provide meaningful career development opportunities to in-house legal teams.

For example, limitations on hiring new lawyers can be seen as a chance to add geographic or functional responsibilities to existing team members who can and accept to take on additional assignments.Those opportunities, whether project-based or long term, enrich lawyers’ legal knowledge, opens new career horizons and can be a good first step towards building a career as an international lawyer. These additional assignments will naturally increase the need to depend on external counsel, which makes external counsel cooperation and support to in-house counsel budget management plans crucial.

Those special assignments can also be an effective way to deploy resources efficiently and ensure service is delivered to more clients, while workload is fairly distributed amongst the members of the legal team.

On the other hand, lawyers can leverage their training and skills in short or long term handling of additional roles that could benefit both themselves and the Corporation such as Government Relations, Public Affairs, Compliance and even Human Resources. This, of course, requires special skill-set and bandwidth as well as the concerned lawyer’s interest in such career-broadening assignments. It is also critical for the success of that approach that general counsel showreadiness to share their department’s resources and that the Corporation appreciates the value of such alternative models.General counsel must also ensure accomplishments and special skills of their team members are adequately seen by other leaders in the Corporation to make sure lawyers get the level of visibility that allows them to be considered for additional roles.

Another way to “do more with less” is to establish user-friendly processes forfrequently required legal services. Such processes can help legal teams increase productivity without resorting to adding resources and while efficiently managing workload. Those processes must certainly be efficient, effective and agile enough to allow revision from time to time as need arises.

One example of a successful process is in the field of “Contract Management”. Most, if not all, in-house counsel saved time and effort by introducing template agreements that could be used in different circumstances for specific types of relationships. Many in-house law departments went further ahead by establishing processes for review and approval of changes that need to be made to those templates, which saved more time and effort. Some have walked the extra mile by fully automating the process and introducing templates in a secure format that allows only changes to specific clauses by specific clients, while other clauses are either unmodifiable or can only be modified by a member of the Legal Department. Combined with a thorough training to involved clients, this model can help improve efficiency of Law Departments without negatively impacting work-life balance.

There are several examples of creative ideas that in-house counsels and external law firms around the world have implemented to enable them to successfully meet Client expectations.This brings us back to the core topic of these three articles, being “Cooperation between external and in-house counsel”. Through that cooperation, the two pillars of the legal profession will be able to identify more best practices to share as well as brainstorm on other creative ideas as we work hand-in-hand to shape the future of legal services.

Columnist: 

Walid Sowaidan, area general counsel – CEEMEA, 3M

The opinions expressed in this column are Sowaidan’s own and not meant to represent the position of 3M or its management.