To say business has significantly changed in the last 30 years is an understatement. We’ve seen significant advancement in technology, high-speed mobile communications, telecommuting, casual working environments, globalization, and diversity in demographics and thought, to name a few.
Remember the rolodex? Phone message slips? Floppy disks? And the fax machine? With such tremendous change, you would think that an in-house lawyer’s role would have evolved with equal footing.
That, however, has not been the case. Corporate America is ready for a new type of lawyer.
Where We Started
But let’s first take a brief look at the evolution of the in-house legal role, which traces back to the mid-19th century. In-house lawyers were viewed as indispensable to corporations and sought after by executive management for strategic legal and business advice.
The scarcity of in-house legal positions gave rise to a wave of young, capable lawyers starting their own law firms to service in-house lawyers—the early 20th-century birth of Big Law consisting of large law firms with hundreds of partners across the globe.
As laws and regulations became increasingly more complex and numerous, Big Law created a one-stop shop for corporations in multiple areas of the law. This decreased reliance on in-house lawyers who tended to concentrate only on a handful of legal subjects.
The importance of in-house legal lawyers greatly diminished and most were relegated to merely corporate governance matters, with the bulk of legal concerns being outsourced to Big Law.
What made Big Law a highly lucrative business was also the reason why it became dreaded—the billable hour. With heavy dependence on Big Law for corporate legal needs, billing rates astronomically increased and corporations had to find ways to mitigate this increased expense.
Cue the in-house lawyer yet again. The in-house lawyer was tasked with mitigating outside legal expenses by leveraging their legal, organizational, and operational knowledge of the business. The role resurged in the latter 20th century.
Now in the 21st century, corporations are ready yet again for a new type of lawyer—Lawyer 3.0.
This lawyer is technologically savvy with a deep understanding of current technology and the emerging tech landscape. We are at a critical juncture in the evolution of technology with artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics, the metaverse, blockchain, and quantum computing. These will change the legal function, and profoundly impact business and society.
This new lawyer is a proponent of technology for attaining maximum efficiencies in the current legal department, but also has a solid understanding of emerging technology to legally guide corporations through the impending future.
America needs a shape-shifting people person powered by social intelligence in the in-house role. They can comfortably interact with any stakeholder within a corporation, including with the formalities of the board of directors, the technical prowess of R&D and engineering, the ambitious drive of the sales organization, the visionary nature of marketing, the passion of the product organization, the millennial nature of software programmers, and the humble nature of operations and manufacturing.
Lawyer 3.0 has the social intelligence to communicate and form relationships with empathy and trust at all levels of the organization. They, in real-time, evaluate their environment on a molecular level, quickly decoding emotional signals, facial expressions, and body language, to allow for achieving greater levels of personal and emotional connection with business counterparts.
It’s a game of psychology and this lawyer is a benevolent master of the game.
While law schools teach students how to think like a lawyer, the 21st-century lawyer goes a step further and harnesses the power of business intelligence. They are keen and quick at identifying and evaluating any business situation in real time to make recommendations that will likely lead to the best potential business outcome.
In this scenario, the legal function isn’t considered an impediment to business that is relegated to being the last check-in in an initiative or product’s life cycle. Instead, Lawyer 3.0 shatters the notion of the lawyer in the corner office and is embedded with all departments on the front lines. They evaluate, advise, and guide various business units at the point of inception of ideas.
An unmistakable agent of business progress, Lawyer 3.0 never, ever says “no.” That phrase can’t exist in today’s business world. Unless clearly an illegal act, there is always a path forward and this new lawyer will always navigate it with unwavering dedication to finding a solution.
Lawyer 3.0 understands the importance of sustainability and consistently delivers leadership, alignment, and commitment around people, planet, and profit. They completely understand that corporations are powerful vehicles for change, that diversity in the workplace is beneficial to all stakeholders, and that the world’s national resources are finite. Thus, they spearhead efforts within corporations to promote this goal.
Lastly, Lawyer 3.0 understands that globalization has created a fully interconnected economic ecosystem and that the smallest disruption in it, even in the smallest of countries, has significant implications on business operations.
They also surpass the basic tenets of globalization, to embrace a deep understanding of cultures and history unique to each country. This serves Lawyer 3.0 very well in multiple areas, including commercial negotiation, regulatory compliance, and political maneuvering.
The business world has changed and will continue to change—rather rapidly and with a complete disregard to the comfortable, status quo enjoyed by so many lawyers. Although technological advancement has been a major catalyst for change in the business world for the past 30 years, the lawyer function has not kept pace with such change. That change needs to start now.
This article does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg Industry Group, Inc., the publisher of Bloomberg Law and Bloomberg Tax, or its owners.
Author Information
Aarash Darroodi is general counsel, executive vice president, and corporate secretary of Fender Musical Instruments Corporation.
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Corporate America is Ready for a New Type of In-House Lawyer - Bloomberg Law
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