How to onboard and level up lawyers for business success

Of course, managing legal concerns for the business is a complex role. As many GCs know, expanding their team is not quite as simple as parachuting in a lawyer or legal professional with theoretical knowledge. Whether your new addition is fresh out of law school or a seasoned veteran, it pays to familiarise them with the unique business context throughout their onboarding and ongoing development. At the same time, ensuring they have the right tools to get the job done is critical for building a successful function. Here are some handy hints to help level up your legal team for success.

Get to know the business in-house and out

Every business has its individual challenges and processes, which in-house legal teams support through processes and services, including:

• Contract management and review

• Marketing compliance checks

• Intellectual property protection and litigation

• Mergers and acquisitions

• Legal advice and counsel

Of course, this is just a glimpse at the breadth of tasks Legal provides. While many lawyers possess experience in a number of areas, it is important to work with the wider business to best understand where they deliver impact. It’s also an opportunity to identify areas that require greater risk management and legal precedence.

Having a Legal team that works in silo is a surefire way to alienate a company’s workforce. Immersing people with one another to create camaraderie is a given, but it’s also the most direct way for different departments to best understand each other and what they do. This is also essential in outlining the logistic relevance of each other’s processes and helps optimise pathways in delivering the final product or solution.

Make sense of industry jargon and acronyms

Every industry has its own operating language and specialised terminology. As legal professionals, your team is already using your own set of jargon, but these might not translate easily when collaborating with other teams and vice versa. Similarly, new additions might need assistance in getting across the internal lexicon of your business. What one industry might call something might be completely different in another. This is especially the case with acronyms. For example, MVP may mean Most Valuable Player when used in a sporting context, but to your SaaS organisation– Software as a Service – it means Minimum Viable Product!

It can be a lot to take in, so the best way to get your team familiar with these terms is to encourage open discussion when they’re used. Again, it is vital the team acquaint themselves with other areas of the business and its processes to comprehend these new phrases, abbreviations and acronyms. Conversely, get your non-lawyer colleagues across the legal language you use, ensuring mutual understanding and reduced operating risk. It could be as simple as a Q&A session or working together to develop an internal glossary. Those seemingly random letter combinations will make complete sense sooner than you think.

Take control of technology

Technology has thankfully evolved at a rapid rate to keep up with the constantly changing world. GCs should champion the use of tech solutions specifically designed for in-house Legal functions to aid their work and reduce time-consuming tasks that once slowed them down. Properly leveraging technological opportunities – rather than simply trying to adapt other teams’ pre-existing but suboptimal systems – can help increase productivity, improve data storage and, most importantly, reduce risk. It also provides technical support that links Legal to other parts of the business, creating more holistic processes and operational smoothness.

It’s been as vital as ever for lawyers to make use of digital tools to keep up with the seemingly ever-growing workloads and complexities of legal matters. Technical proficiency with purpose-built programs and applications used day-to-day is one part of the puzzle, but legal professionals also need to be aware of emerging cybersecurity threats that could strike at any time. Being vigilant of these risks should always stay top of mind.

The law school to in-house pipeline

Let’s use our very own example. The Plexus Marketing Suite team consists of practising lawyers reviewing material that passes through the Promotion Wizard and Marketing Wizard applications. While law school provided the team’s foundational legal education, entering the compliance law niche enabled new learning and development opportunities in various areas.

“Law school definitely instilled the essential skills of analysis and critical thinking, but entering Plexus gave me a platform to apply those skills in practical situations,” explains Plexus lawyer Belle Delpirou. ​“I’ve definitely absorbed a lot of information along the way.”

Fostering clear lines of communication within the Plexus Marketing Suite team and between the wider organisation was a priority for manager Emma Tiberi.

“Good team communication is essential for us to bounce ideas off each other and effectively have peer-to-peer shared information. There’s no point in hoarding knowledge because that doesn’t help anybody,” says Tiberi.

“We can gain insights about our customers by collaborating with Sales, which helps tailor our advice,” agrees Plexus lawyer Alana Caiafa.

Developing an understanding of different industries also lays out specific legal knowledge and considerations for the team to be aware of.

“Some of our customers are from highly regulated industries, so we’ve studied the law inside and out to manage risk when giving advice,” says Tiberi. ​“Understanding the different industries that we work with also enables us to develop frameworks to be commercially minded and drive trade while offering legally compliant advice.”

How to get started

Legal teams and lawyer work should not be unnecessarily shrouded in secrecy, so the first step to ensuring robust business operations is being open. Approachability and accessibility is an important factor to keeping your teams onside to keep things running smoothly. Use technology to make your legal life a lot easier. As the adage goes, teamwork (and techwork) makes the dream work.