Introduction
In today's competitive and complex business environments, in-house legal departments are increasingly expected to create and demonstrate their value to business success. A recent UK-based study including more than 100 general counsels, heads of legal, and other senior in-house lawyers in different firms illustrates this trend (Nabarro 2011): whereas in 2010 only 3 % of the participants reported that they already perform tasks with high-level strategic value (e.g., strategic business planning, change and process management, introducing commercial opportunities), 29 % of them expected to perform such activities in 2015.
In the same vein, 54 % of the participating CEOs deemed it “very important” that the legal function contributes economic value to the organization (Nabarro 2011).A. Tumasjan (*) • I.M. Welpe
Technische Universitat Munchen, Lehrstuhl fur Strategie und Organisation, Arcisstr. 21,
80333 Munich, Germany
e-mail: andranik.tumasjan@tum.de; welpe@tum.de
© Springer International Publishing AG 2017 129
K. Jacob et al. (eds.), Liquid Legal, Management for Professionals,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-45868-7_9
To create value for their internal clients, corporate lawyers need not only a thorough understanding of the abstract commercial goals of the organization, but they also need to act entrepreneurially in recognizing, evaluating, and exploiting opportunities for value creation (Tumasjan et al. 2013). Entrepreneurial behavior in organizations can be defined as “the extent to which individual workers proactively engage in the creation, introduction, and application of opportunities at work, marked by taking business-related risks” (De Jong et al. 2013, p. 982). Management research provides a rich basis of evidence on the individual and organizational factors that foster such entrepreneurial and value-creative behaviors. Using such evidence-based knowledge (Pfeffer and Sutton 2006) will provide legal departments with concrete and tested indications for “running legal as a business”.
In this chapter, we present selected findings from management research and identify the individual precursors (i.e., individual mindsets) as well as organizational antecedents (i.e., structural components) for enhancing entrepreneurial behavior in organizations. Moreover, we provide suggestions for how both individual and organizational antecedents can be measured in legal departments (and organizations in general) for assessing the status quo and providing a discussion basis for potential change. We conclude by showing how these insights can be combined with the notion of the co-creative enterprise (Ramaswamy and Gouillart 2010) to outline how legal departments can discover and exploit value creation opportunities together with their internal clients.
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