Webinar report - Legal Leaders: Commercial vs legal advice

Luscinia Brown-Hovelt is a Legal Adviser and Certified Coach, Mentor and Speaker and currently interim General Counsel and Company Secretary at end-of-life charity, Marie Curie. Luscinia has previously held senior legal roles in sectors such as hospitality, retail, manufacturing, pharmaceutical and vehicle rental.

Natasha Ballantine is General Counsel at Foundry, the developer of software for the creative industries, and a Magistrate Judge in the Central London Justice Area. Natasha joined Foundry in 2022 following a nine-year spell as Assistant GC with JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Defining commercial legal advice

Whatever role you hold, think of yourself firstly as an integral part of your organisation – a business person but with legal training. Put this into practice by working on these four priorities:

1. Understanding your organisation’s objectives and the legal and political framework of your sector. You need a solid grasp of these to align legal to business strategy and ensure your input resonates.
2. Risk management. Time and resource for in-house legal teams are finite. Identify where the greatest risks lie and make time to focus closely on these.
3. Pragmatic, practical solutions. Often, solutions presented to you won’t work from a legal perspective. The trick here is to come up with alternatives that aren’t laden with complexity.
4. Flexibility in communications. Simply reciting unfiltered law to internal stakeholders isn’t effective communication. Adapt your style to the concerns of the people you’re advising. These concerns vary greatly within an organisation.

Striking a balance between legal and commercial advice

Take time to educate people about your role, the purpose of the legal function and how the law relates to your organisation. Keep that process going as your role develops over time.

Question the questioner. Are people asking the right things? Sometimes you need to answer questions you weren’t asked to give the information someone really needs. Ask questions of your own to ensure your advice is legally accurate and commercially relevant. Read the room to avoid making your advice too commercial or too legal. 

In advance of contract negotiations with external organisations, agree red lines with your internal stakeholders. What are you trying to achieve? What is the broader context? What are the risks and the organisation’s own risk appetite? These conversations will help you remain within the legal/commercial parameters.

Crucially, avoid oversimplifying legal advice. This can lead to poor understanding of risks and, therefore, inadequate risk management.

Finding your personal balance as a lawyer and a business adviser

Wherever you find the balance in the advice you give, always maintain your independence. As an in-house lawyer, you have responsibilities as an officer of the court and SRA ethical guidelines to work within. Meanwhile, ensure your organisation understands the principles of legal privilege.

You can’t please everyone all the time. Sometimes you’ll need to find the balance of risk that everyone can live with, if not get enthusiastic about. In some sectors, a lot of advice is necessarily legal in nature. In others, a more nuanced approach is possible. Your organisation will need to understand where it sits on this sliding scale of risk versus commercial opportunity.

Building relationships

Great relationships matter. As well as driving effective collaboration, they can take the awkwardness out of difficult conversations.

Make time to sit down with stakeholders over a coffee or lunch. Understand their general and as well as legal pain points. If possible, attend their team meetings to get insights into challenges at everyday operational level. Be empathetic in these interactions. Putting yourself in other people’s shoes will help you find solutions to their problems.

Advocating for early legal involvement in projects will help you provide the best possible support. So too will using your helicopter view to facilitate cross-departmental collaboration.

Developing your communication style

A clear and memorable communication style is a great asset for anyone in business. For an in-house lawyer with relationships across every discipline in the organisation, it’s indispensable. As well as explaining complex legal concepts to non-lawyers, you’ll need to develop relationships with people from finance to HR, marketing to production. All these people have unique communication styles and relationships to legal. Luscinia and Natasha offer these brief pointers:

• Avoid Latin and legalese when explaining law to colleagues. Use plain English to explain what complex terms mean;
• Speak with your own voice. If you rely too heavily on AI, you’ll lose your authenticity;
• If people are interested in legal texts, provide them as an adjunct to support your single line advice; and
• Be brief. Use bullet points where possible and never ask readers to scroll through endless paragraphs of unduly detailed explanations.

Demonstrating your worth

Wherever possible, blow your trumpet and promote legal’s contribution to the widest possible internal audience. A great way to do this is to link meaningful data from the legal function’s work to the organisation’s strategic goals. Use the business’s language and communication style when preparing these updates.

When advocating for legal among decision makers, remember that as lawyers you inhabit a world of words, whereas the C-suite is navigating a world of numbers. Interpret your successes stories into meaningful figures for senior management.

And for more on this subject…

Next webinar: 8 October

Our third Legal Leaders webinar this year is entitled Demonstrating my worth. We’ll be looking at how to build trust and show the real value of legal in language your organisation understands. Register here.