Knowledge

The Lawyer's Paradox

Lily has been appointed as the new head of the legal department. Before her, the department was seen as a rather obscure, bureaucratic department of experts without much of an interest in the business. Lily is ambitious, and she wants to make the most of her new function and of the legal department. By the way, this is also one the reasons why she was appointed: the top management was feeling the need to proactively tackle the growing legal risks surrounding the business. 

Lily starts an ambitious program to develop the legal department: she hires briljant, energetic and ambitous lawyers, just like her, she defines an inspiring mission statement for the department, she organises quality circles, working groups and training sessions to improve the performance, and most of all she encourages her team to be close to the business, to position themselves as “business partners”, and to become central players, not just experts on the side. 

And her strategy works. She gets promoted to the company’s Executive Committtee, her lawyers are everywhere, in all working groups, project teams, and strategic committees whatsoever. The outstanding quality of the work by her lawyers make them the natural recipients of all sorts of assignments, from drafting a speech for the CEO to proofreading a strategic plan to leading an internal committee for ISO certification. On the legal side, they get plenty of work: they are involved at the very start of projects, just as Lily had advocated, and soon nothing serious gets done in the company without a lawyer being involved. 

Mission accomplished for Lily? Sure, yes… but the problem are starting to pile up. The lawyers in her team are becoming completely overstreched, although the company is generally known for allowing a healthy work-life balance. The team is so busy that they can’t keep all their customers happy. They start to arrive late in meetings, they forget deadlines, and the overall quality of their work is declining. The atmosphere in the department is turning sour. Two lawyers have left, one for a job in corporate affairs, and the other for a legal job, but in another company. 

What went wrong? 

Isn’it a paradox that the relentless ambition to be good leads to frustration and ineffectiveness? 

What should Lily have done differently? 

This little story leads to interesting questions for in-house department: 

• Do we recognise ourselves in the story? At what stage of the story are we? 
• If we are overloaded, how are going to prioritise our work? What shall we continue to do? What shall we delegate? To whom? (outside counsel, the end-users themselves)? What shall we stop doing? 
• Can we develop tools, such as standard documents, checklists, databases, intranet, training programs, etc. to empower our clients to do more things themselves? 
• How can we streamine our processes? Where are we loosing time? - Are we suffering from an excessive need to please others and get recognition?

Antoine Henry de Frahan | 7 September 2009 |