Leading in-house counsel throughout a ‘worldwide web’ -Matthew Fawcett

When I speak about the differences of working in-house versus in private practice, I usually highlight the items in the table below.

AMC: According to our statistics, in-house counsel in Hong Kong see “Changing non-lawyer colleagues’ perception of the legal function from being a barrier to being a business partner” as the biggest challenge they have to face. Have you come across this challenge and how would you suggest approaching this drawback?
MF: I agree that is a challenge, perhaps even greater in the US because lawyers are generally held in low regard here. Unfortunately that reputation has been earned, going back to Shakespeare, by ‘ambulance chasers’, and people hold that bias against the profession generally. The best way to combat it is simple to state but hard to achieve, and that is to act like a real business partner. That means, for example, providing recommendations, not just issue spotting risks. It means understanding that business success requires risk taking and helping your client take on reasonable risk, not insisting on eliminating risk. It means “sitting in the worry seat”, a phrase I like to use when talking to my team, describing the role we want to play for our internal clients.

AMC: Our community stated that certainty of cost, responsiveness and industry knowledge are the three biggest concerns when dealing with external counsel, though some noted extra capacity e.g. secondments and making them look good as being important too. Is this the case in your experience and why do you think this is?
MF: All those concerns are valid, and I think they stem from the fact that large law firms tend to move slower and are less innovative, responsive, and cost-conscious than their clients. Law firms and the clients they represent have fundamentally different business models, where leverage for a firm means lots of bodies billing on a matter, and leverage for a company is generally the opposite: getting more productivity out of fewer people. That difference permeates each institution in visible and invisible ways and I think explains some of the items in your question.

AMC: What are some of the main challenges that you have to overcome as a global general counsel as opposed to a regional one and how do you do so?
MF: Resource management is probably the main issue I confront on a global basis. We do business in 100 countries, but it is not practical to hire counsel in each country where NetApp’s products are sold. This also affects how we go to market. On one hand you want to localise every aspect of your business to suit the language, custom and manners of a country. On the other, it is far more efficient from a cost perspective to only have a single flavour of ice cream, so to speak.

On the flip side, it is terrific to see different regions of our global team collaborate and work together, which happens all the time, whether it is serving one of our global customers, developing and rolling-out policy, training employees and partners or just sharing best practices. We call it “passing the ball in the dark”. For example Valerie Velasco’s APAC team working deeply with Dierk Schindler’s EMEA team and Elizabeth Ward’s North America team. I would characterise that as a challenge because it is not easy to do at a world class level, and we put a lot of time and attention into passing the ball in the dark well. It yields great benefits for our internal clients when we are truly collaborative on a global basis.

AMC: Please describe how the in-house role has changed as the market has developed
MF: Law departments have grown significantly in size over the past decade or two. The growth first started because of money: for any company of scale, an internal law department is more efficient and cheaper than sending every single item to outside counsel. But law department growth continued because companies realised the business value of a strong law department. Some of this evolution is reflected in three parts of a law department:

1. More ‘specialist’ lawyers are finding in-house roles. No longer is the department just for corporate generalists. Today, many companies staff litigators, real estate counsel, labour lawyers and so forth.

2. Some companies have started recruiting junior lawyers, even first year associates in the case of a few companies, deciding that their training and development programmes will develop and accelerate a young lawyer faster than a law firm’s. By contrast, not that long ago, in-house jobs were only available to lawyers with 10 years or more of experience.

3. Non-lawyers make up a bigger part of many departments than ever before and are performing legal and quasi-legal work. This wave started with contract negotiators joining the team, but has evolved to include a variety of roles, including operations personnel, IT/technical talent, IP specialists etc. As law departments have grown, they have also diversified in interesting ways.

AMC: Some things in life are left to chance, but what would you suggest to a young lawyer trying to positively control their career trajectory?
MF: I was actually at Boalt Hall, U.C. Berkeley’s law school, last month doing a ‘lunch and learn’ for the students there, offering my viewpoints on building a career. With any career advice, I have to note that when I first began practising law in 1992, I would never have guessed that my career would be as a General Counsel. Regardless of what flavour of legal career you want, my top three pieces of advice are these:

1. Be prepared. I am astounded by how many young lawyers and law students come to interviews without researching the prospective employer and interviewer. It only takes 15 minutes and a smartphone.

2. Work hard. You are competing on a global scale today. The world is filled with smart people willing to work hard to achieve. If you want to be successful at the highest level of your profession, you will have to earn it.

3. “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything” — Dwight D. Eisenhower. It is important to build your personal career plan, but know that opportunities will appear randomly and unexpectedly, and you need to be nimble enough to seize those opportunities, even when they do not fit into your current plan. For example, I did not expect to spend time as a Deputy District Attorney doing criminal trials, but in 1994 when my law firm’s San Francisco office imploded (and I was out of a job as a second year associate), I found an opportunity to do what all young litigators desire but do not get in big firms: doing trials.

AMC: What’s the best advice you’ve ever received and what’s the best advice you could give?
MF: I wrote a short article for Forbes about nine great pieces of advice.1 In the interest of brevity, here are three of my favorites:

1. “Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be” — John Wooden (legendary UCLA basketball coach).

2. “Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care” — Theodore Roosevelt (26th U.S. President).

3. “Omne trium perfectum” (Everything perfect comes in threes) — Hopefully this interview helped make that point!

Endnote:
1. The article can be found at: http://www.forbes.com/sites/netapp/2015/04/29/best-advice/