Hello again everyone and welcome to 2024!  If you are a long-time reader of the blog, you know that I start the new year with a list of issues I believe in-house lawyers should pay attention to over the coming 12 months.  I started doing this when I first became a general counsel way back when and something I kept doing throughout my in-house career.  I still do it now as CEO of the Hilgers Graben law firm.  To sum it up, I spend time thinking about developments, trends, and issues that may have a material impact on the legal department/business over the course of the new year.  How did/do I do this?  Here are the basics:

• It starts with simply gathering information.  As general counsel, that meant (over the last few months of the year) speaking with other in-house lawyers and outside counsel, reading newspapers, blogs, industry reports, attending conferences, sitting in on meetings within the business, asking business leaders at the company, asking my team what they were seeing, and just generally paying attention to what was going on around me.  Information is gold to in-house lawyers, the currency of the realm.  Be greedy and gather up as much as you can.
• Once I spotted a potential issue, I looked at it from multiple angles and asked this question: How might this affect the company and the legal department?  Answering this question meant I had to understand the company’s goals and strategy so I could spot and manage risks and I had to be a strategic thinker, looking beyond just the legal issues that might be at stake.  One thing that has helped me over the years in terms of looking at issues from multiple angles is the “Phoenix Questions” (discussed in more detail below).
• From there, I made a list of the most critical issues I spotted and worked them into the goals and activities of the legal department for the upcoming year.  To assist me with this process, I created multiple checklists to help quickly analyze the potential risks and strategic implications of the items on my list.  Here is a version of one checklist, and it’s a helpful filter when you look at things coming across your desk day in and day out:
  • Is this something that can create or destroy value for the company?
  • How does this fit into my company’s strategic goals?
  • What is the quantitative/qualitative impact of this?
  • Could this be a game-changer and how so?
  • Is this something a regulator might care about or lead to litigation?
  • Who is impacted by this – company, competitors, vendors, customers – and how so?
  • What happens if I apply game theory to this?
  • Who needs to know about this in the department/company?
  • How can we create a competitive advantage from this?
  • Have others had problems or success with this before and what are the lessons already learned?

How you answer these questions tells you a lot about the issue you are analyzing and whether it matters or not.  You do not need a checklist, but it’s a tool that can help you quickly sort through a lot of information.  You could also use an Eisenhower Matrix (2×2) to plot issues, focusing on the ones you put in the upper right quadrant (and understand that you may move items around over the course of the year).  Regardless of what you use, It’s really all about finding a consistent framework to use to consider and think about whatever is in front of you.  So, there you go.  Enough theory, it’s time to get on with another year of Ten Things You Need to Know as In-House Counsel and my list of critical issues in-house lawyers should pay attention to and plan against for 2024:

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