How to build a legal team strategy

Businesses change constantly and therefore you need to devise a strategy that is sufficiently flexible to enable you to deliver the legal services your organisation requires and to allow you and your individual team members to fulfil their career aspirations. In-house lawyers have a duty to ensure organisations understand the level of legal risk inherent in their activity and to enable accountable staff to make informed decisions at the right level of seniority. They are also tasked with keeping risks at tolerance through contracts, advice and training.

The first step is to understand what activities the organisation undertakes, its future plans, where it operates, and which business activities are likely to have the biggest impact on the organisation if they were to go wrong. Often it's the small things that cause the biggest problems.

Next, consider how laws and regulations will affect those activities and plans. Think about how important and unpredictable those laws and regulations are and which, if any, are outside the team's remit. If you ever feel a law is beyond your scope, for example, due to reasons of geography or specialism, make sure that you take appropriate external advice. The final step is to create a legal risk heat map that acts as a framework for visualising the interaction between:

A legal risk heat map can help inform discussions about an organisation's appetite for legal risk. Consider direct costs (such as your legal team and supplier costs) and indirect costs (such as restrictions in business activity and the expenses related to compliance activity across the organisation). For further information, see Practice note, How to set organisational risk appetite.

The factors to think about here are your:

It is important to remember that your work must serve your personal objectives, as well as those of your organisation and your team. Your strategy should therefore aim to deliver benefits to all three of these stakeholder groups. Your biggest decisions will probably revolve around two questions: how should we be doing what we are supposed to be doing, and how do we get from where we are now to where we need to be?

Aim to answer these questions in that order, and then check that your short and long-term plans make sense and are achievable. Be prepared to work with things that are beyond your control, for example, where the organisation is in a heavily regulated sector and must comply with regulatory requirements. You may also have to fit in with internal constraints, such as corporate locations and group structures.

For further information, see Practice note, Delivering contracts, advice and training to the business.

Some of the big questions to ask yourself as you shape your team's long-term strategy include:

Thinking long and hard about these questions will help you plot how you get from your current position to where you need to be. It will also help you identify how your new legal team strategy will affect other teams and departments in the organisation. You may need to build a compelling sales pitch to get their enthusiastic buy-in.