Of course, managing legal concerns for the business is a complex role. As many GCs know, expanding their team is not quite as simple as parachuting in a lawyer or legal professional with theoretical knowledge. Whether your new addition is fresh out of law school or a seasoned veteran, it pays to familiarise them with the unique business context throughout their onboarding and ongoing development. At the same time, ensuring they have the right tools to get the job done is critical for building a successful function. Here are some handy hints to help level up your legal team for success.
Every business has its individual challenges and processes, which in-house legal teams support through processes and services, including:
Intellectual property protection and litigation
Mergers and acquisitions
Legal advice and counsel
Of course, this is just a glimpse at the breadth of tasks Legal provides. While many lawyers possess experience in a number of areas, it is important to work with the wider business to best understand where they deliver impact. It’s also an opportunity to identify areas that require greater risk management and legal precedence.
Having a Legal team that works in silo is a surefire way to alienate a company’s workforce. Immersing people with one another to create camaraderie is a given, but it’s also the most direct way for different departments to best understand each other and what they do. This is also essential in outlining the logistic relevance of each other’s processes and helps optimise pathways in delivering the final product or solution.
Every industry has its own operating language and specialised terminology. As legal professionals, your team is already using your own set of jargon, but these might not translate easily when collaborating with other teams and vice versa. Similarly, new additions might need assistance in getting across the internal lexicon of your business. What one industry might call something might be completely different in another. This is especially the case with acronyms. For example, MVP may mean Most Valuable Player when used in a sporting context, but to your SaaS organisation– Software as a Service – it means Minimum Viable Product!
It can be a lot to take in, so the best way to get your team familiar with these terms is to encourage open discussion when they’re used. Again, it is vital the team acquaint themselves with other areas of the business and its processes to comprehend these new phrases, abbreviations and acronyms. Conversely, get your non-lawyer colleagues across the legal language you use, ensuring mutual understanding and reduced operating risk. It could be as simple as a Q&A session or working together to develop an internal glossary. Those seemingly random letter combinations will make complete sense sooner than you think.