When Jonathan Truppman was interviewing in the fall of 2008 for a Big Law summer associate position, he noticed that one of the interviewers seemed a bit distracted. He soon learned why: News broke during the meeting that Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. had filed for bankruptcy protection.

Graduating law school during the peak of a recession that hit the legal industry particularly hard had a profound effect on millennial lawyers, including general counsel-to-be like Truppman, 33, who is now the top lawyer at Casper Sleep Inc.

“The people who came out of law school at the same time as me were forced to make our own paths,” says Blake Nielsen, the 31-year-old GC, vice president of operations and corporate secretary at Chicago-based investment management software company Enfusion. “We had to expand our horizons so oftentimes we were exposed to business.”

The ability to carve one's own path, as well as a certain business-mindedness, are among the hallmarks of in-house lawyers who are part of the millennial generation—born between 1981 and 1997.

According to both experts and millennial in-house lawyers themselves, these and other characteristics of this generation, including a distaste for hierarchy and an openness about the corporate role in social issues, mean that the millennial-helmed and -staffed law department of the future could look very different from the legal department of today.

A willingness to get involved with the business has proved fairly common among millennial in-house counsel. This is a product perhaps of both their recession-era career tracks and the timing of their coming of age in the legal department, as in recent years GCs, broadly, have become more involved with business strategy than they were in past decades.

Nielsen is one millennial GC whose career after law school has included stints outside the law. After graduation, he spent nearly a year as a generalist at a firm he set up with a law school classmate and also as counsel at a consumer fraud class action firm. But then he worked for about 18 months in the financial services industry, an experience that he said helped pave the way to his becoming what he calls a “modern GC.”

It's also informed his approach to his general counsel job. “Traditionally, the legal department is the department you go to when you have a problem,” Nielsen says. “But I'm a trusted business adviser. I get to play quite a large business role.”

“I like to see the legal skills as a differentiating skill rather than as a defining skill,” he adds.

At Enfusion, Nielsen has spent plenty of time with the business. He has negotiated and made decisions about business agreements, and drafted and implemented cyber and disaster recovery policies and procedures. He's played a part in releasing new products, from drafting the associated contracts to selecting vendors and working out business arrangements with them. Nielsen also drafted and implemented Enfusion's current business continuity program and negotiated new fee models with counterparties for existing and new offerings.

Truppman's experience has been similar. When he started at Casper in 2015, it was as VP for business development and legal, with 75 percent of his duties devoted to heading up business development and strategy. “And during the 2 to 4 a.m. hours, I worked on legal matters,” he says.

Truppman says that GCs need to get out of their legal comfort zones. “Anybody who comes in and thinks they're just supposed to be a lawyer shouldn't be in-house,” he says. “There are only business issues but with legal implications, and if you're looking at a problem strictly through a legal lens, you're going down a rabbit hole of inefficiency.”

Jonathan Wright, the 32-year-old CLO and GC at QPharma Inc., a life sciences software company, agrees. His business role has included drafting a software-as-a-software agreement for QPharma to use as a template between the company and its life sciences clients. This required him to meet with key IT individuals with whom he would not typically meet in order to gain their buy-in.

In addition, Wright weighed in on whether the company should continue to partner with a specific type of wholesale distributor, knowing that implementing a policy against doing so would contravene the bottom line.

“I presented the pros and cons to leadership and particularly monetized the latter, should my suspicions be correct,” he says. “I corroborated my suspicions with statutes and governing legal frameworks to support my—admittedly unpopular with the business team—perspective. Ultimately, management bought into my idea and never looked back.”

A New Approach to Work

In addition to their greater involvement in business, millennial in-house lawyers have displayed a low tolerance for established corporate hierarchies and a willingness to go their own way. With a lot of the structure and strictness out the window, millennial in-house lawyers are freer than their parents were to decide how their careers will progress.

Michael Bloom, founder of Praktio, a legal education technology startup, attributes a certain sense of autonomy in millennials' career choices to the Great Recession.

“They've been chastened by the economy,” says Bloom, who was formerly clinical assistant professor of law and director of the Transactional Lab & Clinic at the University of Michigan Law School. “They've learned that, 'We have to take our career by the horns. It is up to us to carve out the career we want. We can't take for granted that our job will always be there.'”

“People are doing more research and homework on what type of career they want, which hopefully leads to a better matching between workers and the types of roles they'll be encountering,” he continues. “And that attitude does everyone well.”

John Schultz, executive VP, chief legal and administrative officer and corporate secretary at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, whose legal department hires and trains lawyers right out of law school, says that because these in-house lawyers tend to eschew a typical tenured structure, they have more flexibility than in the past to switch positions within legal departments and get a broader view.

Schultz says older generations care about many of the same matters that are important to millennials, but the latter will generally be more vocal about it. This is particularly true, he says, when it comes to how the business speaks about social issues and how it gives back to communities and customers.

“They are going to communicate more openly about it and be less interested in reading a brochure or getting some corporate speak on a website,” he says. “You see in millennials this peer-to-peer discussion in which you get more of a group dynamic.”

This observation lines up with Truppman's outlook. “This is a generation where people are not solely driven by money anymore,” he says. “People want to work not necessarily where the highest salary is but at a place that has values with which they agree. They view their job as not just a job but as a definition of who they are and a validation of their views and their ethics.”

“We are more vocal and proactive,” he continues. “The older generation tends to find their calling after there is a crisis, but in these days of immediate activity, media and otherwise, GCs are stewards of corporate ethics and values more than ever before. They are speaking as the voice of the company proactively.”

Impact on Operations

The go-their-own-way style that some millennials bring to the legal department is already having an influence on department operations.

Michelle Sharpe Silverthorn, the diversity and education director for the Illinois Supreme Court Commission on Professionalism, and a millennial herself, says these young GCs are “disrupting how law firms service their clients.”

She says they're bringing a new perspective to decisions like staffing matters and calculating bills. Millennials are willing to try new solutions, she says, and “are not expecting law firms to assign junior associates to what a robot or algorithm can do.”

QPharma's Wright is a millennial adamant about getting tough on outside client billing. He says that on more than one occasion, he has provided a very strict billing guidelines form that he drafted and required outside counsel to sign before engaging in legal work for his company.

“Those [firms] that have bought in have met expectations, despite their initial pushback. But the pushback stemmed from my direct attack on exorbitant outside counsel fees and scenarios that allow for them,” he says.

In addition, Wright says, millennials and other younger in-housers also tend to better understand and actively encourage the use of technology. “Kids who grew up with their tablets in their face, for better or worse,” he says, are certainly going to influence how technology is used in legal departments. Simply because of their comfort with it, he says, millennial GCs are likely to embrace technology that can, for example, drive down costs by automation.

Nielsen says that “in today's world, everything is touched by or involves technology, including how laws and regulations consider new technologies.” It's become essential to his job. For example, he says, Enfusion's clients and prospective clients generally have regulatory obligations to conduct due diligence on the company's cyber policies and controls. By understanding the technology the company uses, he can more effectively and efficiently establish new relationships and manage existing ones, while also managing risk.

“The way that we're seeing things evolve, whether you're a millennial GC or someone who's been practicing for 30 years, you're going to have to evolve and understand technology,” he says. “To be a cost center is no longer acceptable. If you're doing your job properly, you can add real value to both the top and bottom lines.”

Not So Different

Although millennials have shown how they stand out, there's also plenty that makes them similar to previous generations.HPE's Schultz says that much of what in-house millennial lawyers want and are looking for is fundamentally the same as what employees from prior generations have wanted.

“They want really interesting work,” he says. “They want to work with people they like. They want to work with a company they like and that does good things in the world so that they're making a difference.” As for the differences, Schultz says, they are “welcome types of pushes” that help HPE evolve.

Although inter-generational work does have the potential to create frustrations and conflict, Silverthorn says, better understanding generational differences and how they came about can help. “We need that shared understanding because the practice of law is built on history and relationships,” she says. “Our profession is rapidly changing, and both younger and older eyes are needed to see things that are moving more quickly than we can even imagine.”

Although a millennial himself, Truppman understands the significant role that attorneys of an older generation play in the modern in-house law department. As his company has grown, he's been able to bring on more experienced lawyers.

“I want to harness those sage silver foxes and female silver foxes who really understand, in a deep, deep way, things that I may not have ever seen,” he says. “They bring many more things to the table that, as you look to build up your department, you will come to rely on to help you pave your way.”