Conclusion
By adapting and applying strategies and tactics that have already stood the test of time in the world of business, the most successful GCs and senior legal department leaders now function as “the C-suite of Legal,” running the legal department with business discipline to achieve results.
Best practices in strategy, systems and processes, useful technology, people and organization, right-sourcing, spend and supplier management, and metrics improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the legal department and win the respect of colleagues and peers throughout the business.Liquid Legal Context
By Dr. Dierk Schindler, Dr. Roger Strathausen, Kai Jacob
Brown offers the pure and stringent future vision for a legal department that aims to be run as a business. He basically states that this requires the department to be made up of and to monitor the same elements as the business overall, i.e. strategy, processes and systems, technology, people, budget, a partner ecosystem etc.
If that is the starting point, his point that legal needs to think of its leadership as the “C-suite of legal”, is nothing but consistent and it reveals the magnitude of the challenge that legal faces in the transformation. Yet, is the change he describes not too much in one leap, too ambitious a goal to be achieved while keeping the eyes on day-to-day work? This is when Brown offers a Legal Maturity model, which is based on the reality of this being a multi-stage journey and at the same time provides for orientation as to “where we are” on that journey.
Based on his vast amount of experience in building up and leading the new types of LPOs and advising clients on exactly that journey, Brown displays very practical and detailed examples on the various building blocks for running legal as a business, or rather for running legal with business discipline to achieve results that add value to the business.
Liam Brown has spent over 20 years as an advisor and consultant helping general counsel and law firm leaders design and implement successful strategic change programs focused on improving effectiveness and efficiency. He founded Elevate in 2011, a next generation legal service provider with the mission to help corporate legal departments and law firms operate more effectively. He was the Founder, President and CEO of Integreon, Inc., a global legal process outsourcing provider, which he led from startup in 2001 to annual sales of nearly $150 million by 2011, before he sold his stake to the private equity investors to launch Elevate. Prior to Integreon, he was the President, COO and co-founder of Conscium, Inc., a pioneering Web 1.0 legal virtual data room technology company, which he sold in 2001. Liam is a frequent speaker at legal conferences and regularly publishes articles about trends in the legal sector. He is also an active investor in Web 2.0 and Cloud technologies in the legal sector, and an executive coach for founders of startups.