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What would you say are the unique qualities required to be successful as an in-house lawyer in your industry?

There are many qualities that are required to be a better than good in-house lawyer, but in my mind one of the most important qualities is the understanding of the business you are supporting and its drivers, together with understanding and assessing risk, and combined with good communication skills. However, you must also be able to evolve and adopt to changes. Hence, being curious and driven by knowledge. The edge of the in-house counsel is that is can more clearly give advice based on the actual risk of the business and not generic advice on the top. A law firm needs to give advice based on being “100 % correct” since it bears the responsibility of the advice for which it is highly paid. The in-house lawyer can assess the actual risk and focus on the elements that are actually important since it knows the business and where it may go wrong. This edge has a clear value that is an asset to the business, being the difference between winning a contract and being disqualified.

Do you have any effective techniques for getting the most out of external counsel, in terms of how to instruct them?

External counsel can be vital in certain scenarios, especially in legal areas where in-house legal competency is not present or when capacity is needed. But what I find most important in terms of working with external counsel, is trust and understanding. I find it useful to be clear and precise in my instructions, and also clear on my expectations. One method I tend to use is to request a short memo (within a limited time) in order to assess if the external counsel has understood the task and is going in the right direction, and then proceed with more depth. But, this is feasible because we are an in-house legal department set up for doing all main tasks internally and not just instruct external counsel. We do not use external counsel unless it provides a value added element.

Do you have any advice on integration of the in-house legal team into the decision making processes of the organisation? How do you achieve your motto of ‘helping to create value’?

Being a part of the decision making in a business is important for all in-house counsel. Unless you get the insight of the business and having its trust, it is difficult to understand its risk elements and business drivers. But in order to get to being a part of the decision making process is all about getting the trust from the organisation by earning your place around the table. And this is why our motto is “Helping. Create. Value”. The legal department is not the star of the business as well as not the front line. We are there to be of help to the business by providing advice to the decision makers, and not being the decision maker. And the advice (or help) needs to take into account the commercial drivers. IF the business is confident that the legal department understands these elements, a shift will take place from (i) the legal department having to invite itself to meetings and propose solutions and advice, to (ii) being invited because the business understands that the legal departments is a business enabler that provides value added advice to the decision making process. And then, this needs to be re-created and maintained.    

What can law firms do to improve their services to the legal department?

One of the main ways is to invest in the relationship, be patient and build knowledge about the area of business of its clients. It is always annoying having to build the law firm’s competency within a field of business. Law firms need to find a proper way of becoming a value added service on top of the legal departments own legal competency. Of course this may differ from one legal department to the other. There are those in-house legal departments which are more in the direction of organising legal matters by using law firms rather than doing the tasks themselves. In my department we have built it up from the perspective that we should be the best within our main legal fields, that is IT law/IT contracts/outsourcing/public procurement/company law and legal fields that are strongly connected to these, such as privacy laws and IP rights and licensing. We use a law firm for its capacity if we have a large workload, special projects or are understaffed. But I always expect the law firms to give me a value added element or point of view from their know-how, a sort of reality check, or to introduce us to new areas which we do not have the capacity to explore ourselves.

FOCUS ON:

Team Building
“How to build a legal department” from a more managerial perspective.

As the general counsel in Scandinavia for Sopra Steria, I have had the pleasure to see the company grow from 700 employees to over 2,000. We are today the largest IT consultancy in Norway in terms of employees and an important contributor when it comes to digitalisation and IT services in Norway. The legal department, which started out with me as the one and only lawyer and legal director, has had to be built one stone after another, adapting to the needs of the organisation. This is why we have grown from one lawyer to a team of lawyers. Tomorrow, [at the time of writing] I have the pleasure to add a new and fifth member to my team. Working as one, I could do as I pleased and I was also responsible of my own competency and how to build it. But, as we have grown, it is also important to take care of the team and manage it, help the junior lawyers develop and grow the overall competency of the team so that they can serve the company. I think that we as general counsel need to have more focus on how we are as managers with respect to our staff. One thing is having a proper legal risk management process that fits the business, but another is to have good management methodology for hiring lawyers, and then build the team and the individual behind. In the end it is all about people, and what I initially responded as being an important factor for success in relation to being an in-house lawyer – being curious and driven by knowledge.