Running an in-house legal department is not an easy job, regardless of whether you are a legal department of one or a legal department of 200.  To start, there is never enough money, people, or time to get everything done.  Second, priorities change frequently so prioritizing where to focus your scant resources is a challenge. Third, the business often considers (wrongly) that the legal department is simply another cost center and/or necessary evil, meaning the legal team is ignored or marginalized – treated like outsiders vs. an integral part of the business.  And fourth, the legal department often lacks strategic direction, reacting to problems vs. planning for them.  I have dealt with (including failing at) all of these issues – and more – as an in-house lawyer, especially as general counsel for multiple companies over the course of a long in-house legal career.  I wish I could tell you that solving these problems is easy, but it is not.  The biggest hurdle is that it’s hard to plan in advance when most of your day is spent frantically trying to dig out from under the incredible amount of work dumped on your desk or when cleaning up the latest catastrophe brought on by the knuckleheads in [insert business group name here].  Still, in order to be successful as an in-house lawyer and create a legal function that fits snugly within the cloak of the company’s strategic goals and plans you must make time for planning.  It’s that simple.  Sure, you can mutter curses at me under your breath or chuck imaginary (or real)[1] rocks at your screen as you read this, but I am just telling you what you need to hear – not what you want to hear.  The good news is that creating a strategic plan for the legal department is difficult but pretty straightforward and something you can accomplish if you set your mind to it (and let others help).  So, hold the rocks and creative profanity for a few minutes as this edition of “Ten Things” discusses how you go about creating a strategic plan for the legal department:

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