General counsel

A handsome silvered fifty five year-old midwesterner with the bearing, and legal acumen, of a 747 pilot. If you encounter him in the lift he won’t have a clue who you are, even though you have worked in his department since 1998.

General counsel habitually float above the messy tedium of actual legal work. They owe their elevated position to a knack for side-stepping difficult decisions — something which, in a large organization during peacetime, it is easy to do, especially one with well-functioning escalation circles. Being commander-in-chief of the armed forces is a cinch when the nation is not at war. Even in the torrid markets of the last decade, for the most part, the nation has not been at war.

But no-one likes to admit they simply tinned it. Thus, most general counsel are inclined to attribute their success to their own extraordinary judgment, commercial nous and deep client relationships rather than having happened to have been mucking about in a dinghy on the tidal flats when the rising tide came in which floats all boats. General counsel will even, occasionally but without irony, accept industry awards for their talents. Those with an ounce of self-awareness will loudly attribute the gong to the relentless hard work and unique skill mix of their team, without which none of their legerdemain would have been possible. But egotists won’t.

The main challenge for a modern-day general counsel is justifying his position at all. He likes to be seen as a visionary, an agent for change, a revolutioniser — whilst of course being nothing of the sort: one does not rise to the top of a profession designed to systematically beat creative thought out out of its practitioners (doctrine of precedent, any one?) by being a left-field kind of guy. A GC will therefore speak frequently of his grand strategic vision. When not consenting to video-interviews for the intranet, a good GC will be advocating resource fluidity or commission a detailed, multi-dimensional risk taxonomy. management of this task will be in the hands of his COO, and the hard-yards saddled on jobbing lawyers whom, you’d think, would be better spending their time actually managing risk, rather than inspecting ones navel looking for it.