Hello again everyone!  As I have done for the past several years, I want to share 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 Julius Caesar took 23 stabs to the body (he should have read my blog about the Ides of March).  Even though I am no longer practicing in-house, the process of trying to spot key issues is something I do every year, including in my role as CEO here at Hilgers Graben.  Simply put, then as now, I like to spend time thinking about developments, trends, and issues that may have a material impact on legal departments/businesses over the course of the new year.  I realize this is not something they teach you in law school (or anywhere really), so I will start by setting out the steps I followed to create my list as general counsel (and you are welcome to laugh at it, use it “as is,” or modify it to suit your own purposes):

• I started by just gathering information.  I would catch up with other in-house lawyers and outside counsel, read newspapers, blogs, industry reports, attend conferences, sit in on business meetings, ask business leaders at the company, ask my team what they were seeing, and just generally pay attention to what was going on around me.  Information is gold and, like Scrooge McDuck, I was (and am) pretty greedy about it.
• Once I spotted an issue that intrigued me, I looked at it from multiple angles and asked this question: How might this affect the company and the legal department?  Answering this meant I had to understand the company’s goals and strategy so I could spot and manage risks and I had to think strategically (not just legally).
• From there, I made a list of the most important issues I spotted and worked them into the goals and activities of the legal department for the upcoming year.  To assist me, I created multiple checklists to help quickly analyze the potential risks and strategic implications of the items on my list.  Here is a shortened version of one checklist.  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?

The answers to these questions tell 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 useful tool that can help you quickly sort through a lot of information.  You can also use an Eisenhower Matrix (2×2) to plot issues.  Here is one option for such a matrix (though what you put on the X-axis and Y-axis is wide open): 

It’s a little clunky for sure, but it just depends on what you find most useful.  Regardless of what you use to help you think through the issues, it’s really all about finding a consistent framework and repeatable process.  Okay, enough of the background story – let’s get going!  This edition of “Ten Things” sets out my list of critical issues in-house lawyers should pay attention to and plan against for 2025:

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