P RA C T I C E
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PRACTICE
What’s in a story? BY SIAN WINGATE
In-house legal teams strive to add value. The in-house lawyer’s role is to manage risk with a balance of reaching the outcome that the business needs. In-house legal teams want to be involved in high-risk, high-value work. From an organisational perspective this is because the majority of legal risk lies here, and so it benefits from the biggest value-add by having a legal mind reviewing it. From a development angle, it meets the need that lawyers working in-house often crave. This is the opportunity to utilise the numerous skills they have acquired during their career. Undertaking high-risk, highly complex work with various stakeholders across the entire business or institution enables the team to develop its skill set each time a project is worked on. However, there may be a barrier to getting enough of this kind of work into the legal team’s pipeline.
Does your business actually know about your team’s skill set? If you are aiming to encourage the business to use your team’s services, the single most important thing you need to be able to do is to showcase your team’s service offering. Your team may include a lawyer who excels at legal project management or due diligence. They can be called on for an asset sale, transfer or acquisition. Another lawyer may be a great communicator. That person may be able to navigate between stakeholder groups to manage risk on a project by getting everyone to talk and discuss the outcomes needed. You may have team members who excel in legal process. These lawyers can analyse several different tasks performed across the business and create an efficient legal process as a result.
Your colleagues need to understand what you do, why you do it and how it adds value to the business. If the business has no idea that an in-house lawyer does something more than certify copy documents, ‘check’ contracts or manage unspecified and vaguely understood ‘legal work’, it may not gain the best value from your team. This can result in frustration among your team members that their abilities are not being fully utilised because no-one seems to know much about them. 80
Telling your team’s story can help you to achieve this In November, I attended the national conference of the Association of Corporate Counsel Australia in Brisbane. A half day of masterclasses was offered to help us improve our skills in a specific area related to in-house practice. I took part in a session led by communications expert Gretel Hunnerup. Gretel explained a little of the science of story-telling. She told us that brain studies show that humans are primed to feel connected to those we meet in person as well as those online – provided they have a compelling tale to tell. Story-telling is a powerful tool for everyone in every discipline, she said. It has been used for thousands of years to communicate, preserve history and to explain life events across almost every culture.
Does your team have a story? You may not initially think your team has a ‘story’. Yet all legal functions started somewhere. The in-house legal function is still an emerging and growing area. There are still entities who are establishing their in-house legal