GSV questionnaire
Background narrative:
- We are being asked to do more with what we have.
- — New products: crypto, deFi, DAOs
- — New risk environment: more volatility (energy, crypto, equities, inflation), more risk of default (archegos, GameStop, evergrande, supply-chain disruptions
- — New/fracturing regulations: Brexit aftermath, China clampdowns, regulatory investigations in aftermath of Greensill, Archegos, etc
Additionally there is new management (CEO and GC), new focus on agility, recognition that we have an excellent, senior team with deep institutional knowledge that may be bogged down in lower value work and that we can get better value out of.
Realistically scope to grow our current capacity is limited: headcount are likely to be static; possibility of attritional headcount loss if departures not replaced.
What operational processes and process regularities are you in
- Approvals
- Escalations
- Annual certification
- Executions
- Regular meetings
- Diary events
As how these could be reorganised to empower others and take legal out of the loop
Opportunity to reassess/redefine legal role against that background to be:
- More strategic
- More advisory
- Identify process waste and overproduction
- Reset incentives inside the firm
Organisational principles
Legal is advisory, for edge cases, novel situations, crisis response and situation management
- Operational interaction is to structure documentation processes to be seamless, standardised, low-touch, and to manage and centralise legal risk from documentation.
Goals:
- Not to defend as necessary everything you currently do, or everything you like doing, or everything you feel you ought to do. To identify ways to better deploy your skills.
Great canards of inhouse legal
- “I am not qualified in that jurisdiction”. Shop-steward behaviour from the international federation of law societies
Theories
- Lawyers should make more calls: the team is structurally more experienced than it was 10y are go. you do not, by dint of a title escalation, suddenly acquire unique insight to the questions “how likely are we do get sued” and “how much money is at stake if we lose” that you did not have before.
- Send fewer matters out: you are a lawyer. You make a call. There must be a reason you cannot make the call:
- “by regulation, it requires a written reasoned opinion I cannot give”
- “It requires the resources of a standing army and I do not have one”
- “It is a matter of great sophistication, requiring specialist knowledge I do not have, and much is at stake if I get it wrong”.
- Ignorance of the law is no excuse: BAU legal knowledge lives with the business. It therefore requires someone senior enough to make the call that this is not BAU legal.