Looking back on the General Counsel NL Fall Conference 2022

This year’s General Counsel Fall Conference was hosted at AEGON’s headquarters. The conference commenced with a panel discussion discussing the twelve most notable results obtained through the just published General Counsel NL Benchmark Survey 2022. This year’s GC panel consisted of four discussants, each having their own expertise, knowledge and experience with international challenges.

Luckily, this year’s keynote speaker and renowned expert on managing the challenges of a multi-national GC, Bjarne Tellmann, thought the attending GCs all about his views on and experiences with building and managing an outstanding legal team to tackle the international challenges of GCs from the perspective of a multi-national GC.

Bjarne explained the role of the GC is getting harder as globalization and innovation have forced the rise of the T-shaped leader. The GC role is changing from head lawyer to mini-CEO of an international business. This forces the GC to become an individual with deep knowledge and skills in their area of expertise, along with the ability to make connections across different disciplines. Therefore, this only further adds to the point that GCs should use their personal training budgets, and make use of those mini-MBAs because they will be needing them. Additionally, the legal landscape is becoming increasingly complex while cost pressures and demand for legal services are both going up. To deal with these changes the GCs were shown a framework, consisting of three main subjects, for building an effective legal team. The framework consists of ‘Hardware’, ‘Software’, and ‘Constants’.

Hardware deals with operational aspects such as risk, structure, budget, partners, and tech. It is important to identify core risks and map them. This allows for the creation of an international risk resilience and mitigation strategy which can be divided into a central strategy for principal legal risks and a locally led strategy for all other legal risks. When identifying the risks and coming up with such a strategy it is essential to consider the Three Golden Rules. First, beware of “groupthink”. Over time, it is easy to converge and have a consensus about what this risk is and actually missing something. Therefore, diversity is a really important component here, bringing in people from other parts of the business can be very valuable. Secondly, risk is like a river. Risk does not stagnate, so you need to manage it on a day-by-day basis in terms of what your risks are. Finally, connect the dots, there are no artificial boundaries thus making the legal landscape increasingly complex.

Once you have established risk, you can then start to look at your organizational structure. Simply put, you have three categories of people in your team. You have specialists who are focusing on those principal risks, generalists who are in the field and attacking everything and you have legal operations experts, people who are really thinking about technology, strategy, budget, etc. . It is very valuable to have a unified reporting structure. Try to align your reporting structure with the organization’s structure but, fight for an integrated, unitary global function considering a unitary budget is important.

Once you have sorted your risk profile, and you have organized your team, you then want to think about your external partners. Really think about strategically procuring your law firm partnerships. Analyze, think about KPIs and track metrics to select through a structured process. Alternative legal service providers (ALSPs) are also a solid option as they allow for immediate skill allocation when dialing up or down.

Software, the second subject in the framework, deals with the ‘softer’ aspects like culture, leadership, and people. Culture can be seen as the values and beliefs that drive behaviour. Managing this is a challenge internationally because in any culture you have sub-cultures. Each of these is different, you want to get under it by really understanding how you shape that. In an existing organization you need to work with what you have and work within the core values of your company, so do not try to tear down the culture but try to shape the culture based on the beliefs and the systems that people have. Once you have established the desired culture you need to make your culture “sticky”. To do so, hire, fire, and promote based on this culture.

Leadership skills are sort of another bucket. An international leader should be an innately curious individual as knowledge grows very quickly these days and you need constant learners, people who import and export ideas. International leaders need to be great communicators, people who can tell stories because that’s how our brains are wired and can influence how people feel. Additionally, great leaders need cultural intelligence as it significantly impacts global team success. Culture determines the way people approach certain values, trust for example. In the Netherlands trust would be task-based, if you are the leading expert in M&A law, I trust you. But there are other countries, many Asian countries, Saudi Arabia, and Nigeria, where personal relationships are actually really important and when you do not build those relationships in advance then you will not have that level of trust. Another thing to watch out for is directness. The Dutch are very direct, something that would not work in, for example, Japan. In these countries, directness can sometimes be perceived as insulting. Understanding culture can be hard but can be handled by establishing cross-border working groups and making sure you spend time in the field and learn how things are going.

Now that we have gone through the hard and soft work. Lastly, Constants refer to the importance of strategy and change management. It is important to spend time with your team, really understanding what it is you do, why you exist and how you can help the company achieve its vision and purpose. This gives you clear direction, helps you prioritize and clarifies what your unique attributes are.

Succinctly, it’s a complex world, made even more complex by the international overlay and technology. You want to approach it by focusing first on your ‘hardware’, second on your ‘software’ and third, managing and paying attention to the ‘constants’.