Historically, the general counsel had a clear mandate: Offer legal opinion on corporate strategy, provide transactional legal support, and manage corporate filings and board minutes. Success was defined by the provision of legal services to the company, while keeping costs down.

But in the digital business era, characterized by accelerated business change and legal uncertainty, the general counsel requires a strategic perspective and cross-functional visibility that is critical to company success. The following developments not only accelerate demand for legal services but, more importantly, increase the importance of the general counsel:

• Growing value of legal assets—A company's strategy and value depend on its intellectual property (IP), data rights and permissions, partnerships and reputation.
• Proliferation of gray areas—New technologies and markets have less-well-defined legal and social boundaries, a development that blurs the distinction between legal and business guidance.
• Increasing returns for corporate speed and agility—Rapidly changing business strategies increase and change the need for and pace of legal support in relation to acquisitions, divestitures, new markets and regulations.
• Persistent regulatory fragmentation—Legal and regulatory frameworks fragment as more countries assert their place in the global regulatory and economic environment, and enforcement activity is driven by populist and other political agendas.
• Rise of social and investor activism—Pressure from consumers and investors has heightened scrutiny of corporate social, environmental, political and governance practices.

In this environment, general counsel must provide insights and decision frameworks that enable experimentation with business models, while managing the underlying legal risk and protecting the legal assets—IP, reputation,and means of regulatory management—on which a company's strategy depends. This requires the general counsel to perform five roles.

Role 1: The GC as Board Adviser

As a company's needs change, so does the role of its board. An effective board tests the assumptions behind business models, identifies corporate threats, capitalizes on strategic opportunities and fosters a culture of integrity. But a high-functioning board—even one composed of qualified directors—is not a given.

Today, the general counsel must actively manage the board. This means ensuring that it has the right skills and experiences, as well as the right flow of information about risks and operations. To fulfill this role, general counsel will have to rethink the nomination process (“Do we need a former CEO, or someone with digital marketing experience?”) and enhance efforts to educate directors.

It is equally important that directors have information about governance expectations and emerging corporate risks. General counsel can enhance the flow of risk-related information to the board by coordinating risk reports across functions (legal, compliance, information security) and ensuring they tell a cohesive story.

Role 2: The GC as Corporate Executive

The general counsel has valuable skills and a valuable perspective to offer the executive team. With a deep understanding of the laws and regulations that define markets, honed negotiation skills and practical insight into an industry's value chain, general counsel can be a critical voice in terms of strategy setting and decision making.

But this voice must be heard. It is no longer enough for general counsel simply to react to strategies with legal considerations. Providing true executive support means identifying and framing the strategic, legal and reputational challenges that a company faces. General counsel must understand the changing expectations of corporate stakeholders (investors, governments, employees) and provide executives with risk-informed insights and frameworks to help them make sound business decisions.

Role 3: The GC as Chief Assurance Executive

Technological developments and regulatory responses are driving “compliance specialization,” which is leading, in turn, to an expansion of internal assurance functions. The general counsel's already large portfolio of duties such as corporate secretary and chief compliance officer is likely to further expand to encompass emerging disciplines such as information governance.

For a company, uncoordinated assurance functions slow decision making and create unintentional growth anchors, even as they fail to create a clear picture of corporate risk. For the general counsel, this situation represents an opportunity to coordinate risk management processes across the various assurance groups. An integrated approach helps a company develop a holistic picture of risk and risk taking, while more easily embedding risk management into operations. By virtue of experience and seniority, the general counsel is often best positioned to serve as a company's chief assurance executive.

Role 4: The GC as Corporate Responsibility Officer

Expectations for corporate behavior are changing quickly. Investors are increasingly concerned about environmental risks and sustainability and employees are looking to influence corporate policies (witness recent employee walkouts). More fundamentally, the idea that shareholder value is the company's primary obligation is increasingly being questioned. As Larry Fink, chairman and CEO of BlackRock, recently said in his letter to CEOs, “Companies that fulfill their purpose and responsibilities to stakeholders reap rewards over the long-term. Companies that ignore them stumble and fail. This dynamic is becoming increasingly apparent as the public holds companies to more exacting standards.”

Here, again, the general counsel has a crucial role to play. The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation states, “The general counsel's ability to incorporate moral and ethical matters within her advice, and her accepted role as 'wise counselor' to management, well-position her to be an important adviser to board and executive leadership on corporate social responsibility (CSR) matters.”

Role 5: The GC as Leader of the Legal Department

Of course, the general counsel must still serve as leader of the legal department. Creating a digital-ready legal department requires the ability to reach new legal judgments as business needs change, and to build those new judgments efficiently into decision making. This demands a shift in departmental focus from providing on-project support to defining efficient support processes.

To build a digital-ready department, the general counsel should:

• Clarify stakeholder roles to reduce operating complexity.
• Build a rapid response capability to support rapid business experimentation.
• Foster development of digital skills in order to consistently acquire and transfer necessary expertise.
• Enable fit-for-business information governance to maximize the value of company data.

Prioritization Is Destiny

The general counsel must perform each of these roles to some extent. The most significant decision is how to prioritize his or her time in relation to these roles. It helps to ask questions such as the following:

• In which roles do I add most value?
• Which roles should I delegate?
• Is corporate strategy lacking a strong legal presence?
• Is the company in the middle of a rapid digital transformation?
• Does the board have the necessary skills and information to fulfill its duty?

The answers to such questions should dictate how each general counsel spends his or her time. And this in turn, will play a big part in determining their success—and that of their company—in 2019.

Abbott Martin is VP of legal team research at Gartner, a research and advisory company headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut.