Mark Smolik's title at DHL Supply Chain Americas is general counsel and chief compliance officer. But his title doesn't really say it all. In reality, Smolik's role at the Ohio-based company extends far beyond the legal department.

During over nine years at DHL, Smolik says he's grown the GC post from one focused solely on law to one that also involves being a trusted business partner. It's not unusual for him to be on a business call to provide non-legal input. That's partly because Smolik says business is “in his DNA”—he started his first company when he was 16 years old—but it also came about with persistence and strategic thinking.

“Sometimes you have to go slow to go fast. For me what that has meant is building my own internal reputation in the company,” said Smolik, who will speaking about legal and business at Corporate Counsel's 2018 SuperConference in Chicago next month.

He's built his reputation on the business side by speaking up when he has a question and not being afraid to suggest new approaches or strategies. In his first weeks at DHL, Smolik was already asking questions in meetings about business-related aspects of the company.

“People looked at me like, 'Gosh, you're kind of a new guy, but you're the lawyer. I didn't expect you to question it,'” he said. “But it set the tone of, if there's a question I feel has value, I'll ask it.”

But according to Smolik, it's not enough to just talk business—general counsel who want a say in finances and budget need to walk the walk. That means running the legal department on a budget while producing results.

In 2009, he sat down with DHL's chief financial officer and asked how many sales it took to cover legal's spending, to get a better idea of what was at stake and the wider impact of his department's decisions. The amount of money being spent on outside counsel left him “shocked.” So he decided to help the business, and make a change in legal spend.

“Find a way to get to the heart of your business,” he said. “Understand what their challenges are and make sure you're very fiscally conservative with spending their money.”

Nine years after that meeting, he's done that by changing where and how the company's legal work is handled. When Smolik joined DHL, the legal department had seven members. Now, Smolik said his team's grown to almost 70. Commodity work, real estate work, leasing work and employment matters that had been outsourced moved in-house, and the savings followed.

Smolik noted that for outside counsel, he also staffs differently than legal did in early 2009. All of DHL's customer contracts are handled by trained nonlawyers.

While DHL has downsized it's outside spend, the department still relies on firms occasionally. In 2009, Smolik instituted a convergence firm strategy alongside the other changes in legal, cutting the number of firms from 350 to 19 core ones. And his team's developed metrics to ensure that the quality of work with outside counsel remains high.

Compensation for outside lawyers is tied to performance, and Smolik has face-to-face meetings to provide feedback.

“For the past eight years we have been evaluating the performance of our outside counsel against key performance indicators, making sure we have high performing firms with high spend. So we hold these firms accountable,” he said.

Smolik says these various strategies to cut legal department spend have proved effective, both at giving the legal team more credibility and in giving them more clout with the business side. And these gains, in turn, have helped make Smolik much more than just a top in-house lawyer.