GC’s Several Roles Require Disparate Skill Sets

The general counsel typically has three identifiable and separate roles: senior executive and strategist, legal advisor, and resource manager, whose job includes determining how much of the department’s budget will be allocated to an outside legal spend. Surveys have determined that the proportion of time a GC spends at each of these roles is remarkably similar, regardless of the departments’s size, writes Altman Weil principal Rees W. Morrison. “Business counselor, legal eagle, and manager – three roles that each call for different skills,” he says. Each of these roles has its own tools and methodologies that general counsel need to adopt and make their own.