essential issues for in-house lawyers

Ten Things: Essential Issues for In-House Counsel (2025 Edition)

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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Ten Things: Essential Issues for In-House Counsel (2021 Edition)

Welcome back, everyone!  I hope your holidays were joyful and restful (and COVID-free).  I was able to make a bit of a dent in the next book, so the ABA goons are leaving me alone… for now.  I did have some time to squeeze in the first “Ten Things” blog of 2021.  As usual, and like I did when I was general counsel, I like to start the year by sitting back and just thinking about all the crazy shit going on out there in the world and how it might impact my company and the legal team.  When I was in-house, I would use this exercise to help me plan out the year, set goals, and – most importantly – set some tripwires for starting to measure and balance risks to the organization.  So, I have been reading a lot, talking with in-house lawyers, and generally trying to figure out what’s hot and what’s not.  No surprise but it looks like a lot of last year’s list is still pretty relevant (click here to read the 2020 list).  But, there are definitely some new players on the field.  And, the idea here isn’t to figure out every possible thing that can cause problems or provide opportunity – that’s impossible (See COVID-19 for more details).  Rather, it is about doing your best to find a lens to help you anticipate the problems you can anticipate so that the issues that inevitably come out of nowhere are easier to deal with or do not hurt as much.  In other words, looking ahead to maximize value creation and minimize value destruction.  Also, you should know that my New Year’s resolution for 2021 is to be a bit more pithy with the blog.  We’ll see how long that lasts (maybe not even to the end of this one).  Anyway, let’s start the car and hit the road!  This edition of “Ten Things” takes a look at my predictions of the essential issues for in-house lawyers in 2021:

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Ten Things: Essential Issues for In-House Counsel (2020 Edition)

When I was a kid there was a Saturday morning cartoon show called Sealab 2020.  I remember thinking that was a long, long way off and wondering how old I would be when 2020 rolled around – – and whether by then there would really be a giant lab on the bottom of the sea with 250 oceanauts fighting sea monsters and battling pollution.  But, here we are; it’s 2020!  I am officially old(ish) and, sadly, sea monsters go un-battled under the ocean (unless you count Wicked Tuna), but pollution on (and in) the high seas runs rampant.   Triple bummer.  What does this have to do with “Ten Things” you ask?  Nothing other than a little nostalgia and the “2020” reference as this is my first post of the New Year.  As usual, we’ll start the year with my list of essential issues for in-house lawyers to pay attention to over the coming months.  When I was general counsel, I started every year thinking about the “big picture” and what risks (good or bad) might be coming down the pike that I needed to be aware of as an in-house lawyer.  It’s not an easy task as there is so much “out there” that can have an impact on your company and legal department.  Still, it’s better to try to anticipate some than to ignore all.  So, once again, I have sat down, read a lot, and thought hard about different issues that will likely have some substantial impact – positive or negative – on in-house lawyers and for which a little bit of preparation or pro-active attention can make you a hero vs. someone caught flat-footed.  With the usual caveat that I have no crystal ball showing me what’s important, here my “Ten Things” 2020 edition of essential issues for in-house counsel:

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Ten Things: 10 Essential Legal Department Issues for 2017

There are an amazing number of issues, trends, and headaches to keep track of as in-house counsel.  So much, that it can be difficult to know what to focus on.  When I was General Counsel I made time each year to step back and try to take a look at the big picture, i.e., given everything going on in the world, what should I and my department be spending time on right now?  Certainly, I wanted to make sure things that were important to the goals of business where high on our list.  But I also wanted to “benchmark” my team and make sure we were aware of what other legal departments were doing.  I would gather information from many different sources and then come up with my own list of current essential “issues/best practices” that I thought we needed to focus on.  Generally, my list contained items dealing with risk reduction, technology needs, management practices, key analytics, and ways to enhance the value of the department to the business.

Though I have not been GC for a little while, I keep my eyes and ears open to what’s going on in the world and how might it affect in-house lawyers.  I thought I would highlight some of the important things I see out there right now — things that should be on every in-house lawyer’s “watch list.”  This edition of “Ten Things” discusses the essential items I would be focused on right now if I were running a legal department in 2017:

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