I have written a lot about delegation, both in the blog and in my last two books, Showing the Value of the Legal Department and The Productive In-House Lawyer. Specifically, I write a lot about why delegation is important and how to do it. This past week or so it has dawned on me that I have not really spent any time talking about what to delegate other than a few asides thrown in here and there. That is an oversight I would like to correct. Like many of my blog posts, one of the first things I do is search to see if anyone else has already written on the topic. I really couldn’t find anything written on what in-house lawyers should delegate. This generally means I have a pretty wide-open field to play in, which I plan to take full advantage of![1] I decided to do what I almost always do and that is reach back to my past and think about the things that were delegated to me as a young in-house lawyer (some), things that I asked to have delegated to me (a lot), and things that I delegated to my team once I was in a position to do so (plenty but should have been more). All of what you read below is pretty specific to my in-house experience – though I suspect they are universal to any in-house lawyer in any legal department anywhere in the world. So, fill up the coffee mug and get ready to go deep into the world of delegation as this edition of “Ten Things” takes on the task of setting out things in-house lawyers can (and should) delegate.
leadership
Ten Things: Solving Problems (It’s Different In-House)
One of the reasons I wanted to become a lawyer was to solve problems. The added bonus was the expectation that someone would pay me (a lot) to read and write stuff to help solve those problems. How cool is that?[1] Law school and then working at a law firm for a number of years post-graduation were both fantastic training for how to solve problems. Well, how to solve legal problems. When I finally got my chance to go in-house, I learned pretty quickly that all my “legal-problem-solving-skills” were useful but many of the problems I was called upon to help with involved only a small amount of legal-ness and a lot of “other stuff” – I’ll just call that other stuff “business issues” to save time (but if you work in-house, you know exactly what I am talking about). Unfortunately, this meant that a lot of what I thought I brought to the table was useful only part of the time, i.e., solving problems as an in-house lawyer is very different from solving them as an outside lawyer. Skip forward a few centuries, and I can proudly say that I have been a lawyer for a long time with most of that time spent in-house – I survived the crucible of fire and walked away with my sanity (and all of my toes). Some don’t.[2] Why? Because, even now, one thing I consistently see from many in-house lawyers is an inability to grasp the very real difference between what the company needs from them when it comes to solving problems vs. what it needs from outside lawyers. Many lawyers (in-house or law firm) tend to fall back on the mind-numbingly rigid dogma[3] of treating every problem like a law school exam. More troubling, even when they know it’s not a legal problem they are trying to solve, they simply don’t know the way forward and fall back into the same pit of despair and anguish. Fortunately, I screwed this up enough times over the decades (and am still coated heavily in despair and anguish) that I can share a little knowledge with you here today. That’s right. This edition of “Ten Things” discusses something I bet no one has raised with you before — how to solve problems as an in-house lawyer:
Ten Things You Need to Know as In-House Counsel® 