The role encompasses to be not just a legal advisor but a business enabler who can not only assess risks but also provide practical and pragmatic business solutions. So apart from advising on the transactional legal issues, ensuring compliance, the role also involves to be part of the commercial/ business team to enable achieve the business targets within set legal parameters and push the boundaries to the extent manageable having assessed the risks for achieving such targets.
It will be inappropriate to comment on this because my journey as a GC has just started but having accumulated my knowledge from my experiences from people with whom I have worked I believe any senior managerial position is more about people management and objective professionalism which I just wish to employ in the journey ahead.
I think the role of not just General Counsel but the legal department of a corporate is evolving as such, from being just a legal advisor and interface with outside legal consultants, solicitors etc, to being aide to the business by not just pointing to the impending risks and issues but also providing preferred solutions to those issues and solve existing problems. GC’s role is expanding from that of a legal strategist to a legal-business strategist not just highlighting the risk but providing solutions as well. Not that every issue will have a solution but providing insight into how best to meet and mitigate the issue.
The general perception which any business anywhere in the world has today about the legal department and GC as the head of the same is the fact that it is a cost centre; therefore it is a consistent challenge to establish how cost effective can this department can be. Particular to India lies the challenge of enormous legal compliances and dealing with the cases, dealing with the authorities at different levels and managing the entire structural discipline of the organisation from both compliance as well as ethical perspective.
I strongly believe that law firms also need to emerge in India from being just fighting cases to being business enablers, a trend that we can see emerging increasingly today in line with the practice in the U.K. Law firms need to be far more responsible towards their role than being just the bridge between the counsel and the inhouse teams, they to be more proactively involved in litigation management, something which a GC needs almost on a weekly basis to update the Board the business. I wish there was a unified single cloud based platform which each of the legal firms will uploaded their updates on which the respective consumers/in-house legal teams can access at their will on their systems.
It is absolutely essential that GCs and their legal teams keep themselves abreast of the legal developments surrounding their business not just in India but in the other major economies. Apart from attending conferences, I think, for continued legal education can be achieved by way of making presentations and publishing articles. The best way would be of course to recognise the GCs or in-house legal members as continued members of the Bar Council and introduce a point-based system for the GCs and in-house teams to mandatorily achieve by way of attending trainings held by Bar Council or agencies so appointed by Bar Council.
I started my career with a solicitor firm and then as a practising lawyer and eventually moved into in-house role and my advice to any person starting his career in law would be to spend at least two years as a litigation lawyer before exploring any other role because it is only as a litigation lawyer that one can complete their legal career life cycle before straight away getting into a in-house legal role. This can be achieved during the law school internships by doing the internships with litigation lawyers before one gets into in-house legal counsel role.
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