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Leading the Law Department: Hire the Best

BY Ben W. Heineman, Jr.
April 01, 2016

For the inside counsel revolution to succeed, the General Counsel must follow a basic dictum: Hire the best. The key to the legal function's credibility with the CEO and senior line executives is to seek broad-gauged lawyers who are outstanding technical experts, wise counselors and effective leaders to occupy the top specialists jobs in the company and to be general counsel in the main operating divisions. Placing the best people in senior lawyer positions across the company also has great ripple effects, as these individuals, in turn, build their specialty or business legal groups through other outstanding hires. Top business leaders will say that they spend a significant portion of their time ' up to 40% ' on hiring, compensating, promoting and retaining people in top jobs. That absolutely must be the case for the General Counsel, and his or her senior peers, in a large, complex company.

The Spec

One can make an endless list of the attributes a GC should seek in her senior lawyers. In my nearly 20 years of hiring great people, one attribute was common to all applicants. They had to be outstanding technical lawyers ' absolutely at the top of the profession with up-to-date knowledge, tremendous analytic ability and the judgment to get to the guts of a matter. This was, of course, true when they were being hired as specialists ' as head of corporate tax or litigation or environment or trade or labor/employment or IP or M&A. But it was also true for individuals who would be general counsels of an operating division. If that division was highly regulated, I was disposed to an outstanding litigator; if it was primarily commercial, I had a preference for an outstanding deal/business lawyer. These preferences were always trumped by unalloyed quality and by a sterling professional reputation as a great technical lawyer.

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