The second challenge is in knowing where to start. You’re planning a restructure, devising a contract management system or needing to manage maternity/paternity absence within your department, say.
The first place you’ll often turn is to your own organisation so as to utilise the experience of your colleagues and the systems and processes that may be available to support you.
This may take you all the way in delivering what you need. Great, job done!
However, you may also find that what’s available doesn’t quite fit the bill because you need something tailored more to your requirements as an in-house legal team. What would be really helpful is input and guidance from your lawyer peers who’ve had experience of dealing with the same issue(s). How did they go about it?
First of all you need a community to tap into. You may already have a robust, informal network of fellow GCs who you can contact for a helping hand. Or you may belong to something more formal where a request for assistance will be heard and (hopefully) responded to.
At CLL we’ve come up with our own take on the problem, which we call Counsel Sourcing. What’s that you say?
As a member of CLL you get access to a community of legal leaders who are dealing with, or have dealt with, just the sort of issues that you’re grappling with. And as a community you may well find that they’re only too willing to share their experience with you!
There are two ways of going about this. You can contact us via this site where we can circulate your request to the rest of the CLL community. You can provide as much or as little information as you’re comfortable with.
Hopefully, you'll get back some helpful information to help solve the problem. And if the subject would be of wider use and interest, we may also, if you agree, turn the topic into an article for our Knowledge section or a viewpoint (blog) or use it as a case study at one of our community discussion groups or events – anonymised as required.
We've had an early trial run of this at CLL. Having been asked about a particular issue we felt it could well be of wider interest. So, we asked our community if anyone had experience of it and, if appropriate, would they be willing to source a short article on it. Within 72 hours we had had a very healthy response with a number of anecdotes and offers of help. So many in fact that we are using them to build an extra article for the Knowledge section of our website. So, it does work!
And, of course, if the issue is one that needs more detailed input then we may be able to help with that as well. Please take a look at our consultation and coaching services.
