FEATURE
In-House Legal Leadership: Survey Highlights By WENDY KING AND DAVID HORRIGAN
D
uring the second year of the pandemic, chief legal officers (CLOs) and their legal departments faced fast-changing challenges in risk, culture and technology. These included ongoing pandemic-related issues; new concerns over environmental, social and governance risk; more active involvement in diversity, inclusion and belonging (DIB) efforts; and a bigger role in technology planning and procurement. Now, as legal teams face another difficult year, they will need to draw upon the endurance
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and experience they developed to lead their organizations successfully into a post-pandemic era. According to confidential interviews conducted by Ari Kaplan Advisors for the third annual edition of The General Counsel Report, 60 percent of general counsel indicated worry over mounting risks. During in-depth discussions, Chief Legal Officers spoke candidly about the challenges facing their legal departments and their organizations across several key areas. Mitigating corporate risk is a traditional role for general
counsel, so it’s not surprising that risk management was a primary focus area in the discussions. However, helping develop the culture of an organization and taking an active role in technology planning are relatively new responsibilities for corporate lawyers — and most likely activities they didn’t anticipate when they started law school. Regulatory challenges were identified as a significant area of focus this year. More than onethird of respondents highlighted compliance and regulations as substantial risks. These were not identified as notable factors last year. In other significant developments, intellectual property loss was not a stated concern for 2022; technology modernization was a concern; and ESG issues, not mentioned in previous years, were listed as a primary concern by multiple participants.
DIVERSITY, INCLUSION AND BELONGING CLOs are also finding culture development and team management, including DIB, to be a growing part of their job descriptions. One hundred percent of the general counsel interviewed said they played some role in DIB, up from 71 percent in the previous year’s study. When discussing DIB as a corporate culture issue, BACK TO CONTENTS
