The role of today's chief legal officer (CLO) has evolved into that of both a strategic contributor and senior executive. In fact, the ACC Chief Legal Officers 2019 Survey found that 78% of U.S. CLOs and 93% of Fortune 500 CLOs report directly to their company's top executive. Further, over 75% provide input on business decisions to executive leaders including the CEO and board.

But as expectations for CLOs ratchet up, how can those legal leaders be successful balancing necessary team management work with the need to meet and exceed responsibilities at the leadership table? Dividing time between “four faces”—guardian, operator, catalyst and strategist—may help.

The Four Faces of the CLO

Guardian: In the guardian role, CLOs focus most on defense of the business—the foundational responsibility for corporate counsel. They guide legal and regulatory matters for the business, mitigating often risks like those in corporate integrity, brand and reputation and governance.

Operator: As operators, CLOs focus on optimizing the talent, capabilities, service levels, costs and legal structure needed to best serve the business. For the in-house counsel team, the CLO as operator fosters professional development programs, identifies and remedies subject matter expertise and technology gaps and improves effectiveness of the legal operating model. With outside counsel, the CLO as an operator develops and implements performance metrics, while also forecasting and reporting on legal spend.

Catalyst: When CLOs act as catalysts, they challenge the status quo as a change agent highly focused on helping executive leadership select the right path forward. To do so, CLOs as catalysts focus on enabling competitive advantage via critical legal guidance by assessing business practices and then building or strengthening areas of the organization including its risk profile, compliance framework and corporate culture.

Strategist: As a strategist, CLOs can help align clear a legal strategy that supports business strategy and enables value creation. Beyond building strong relationships with leadership teams and board members, CLOs as strategists understand business strategy and value creation leavers as well as changes in regulatory requirements and public policy, reflecting them all in legal strategy.

The Time Allocation Challenge

Deloitte interviews with executive leaders indicate that most CEOs and boards want the full C-suite to spend the majority of their time—about 60% to 70% — on catalyst and strategist work, with just 30 to 40% in the guardian and operator roles.

However, many new CLOs have told us that their time allocation is often the reverse of CEO and board requests.

Even experienced CLOs sometimes find it difficult to align their time allocation to meet the expectations of the CEO and board. However, the difference between new and experienced CLOs seems to be the ability to spend less time on operator work and contribute more to strategist work.

It's important to note that while experienced CLOs we interviewed want to spend more time than new CLOs on catalyst and strategist work, both new and experienced CLOs we spoke to wanted to allocate more time to their catalyst and strategist roles.

Tackling the Time Crunch by Prioritizing Talent

Shifting a new or experienced CLO's time into more strategist and catalyst work takes prioritization of legal operations. If an organization doesn't already have a strong legal operations leader in place to manage guardian and operator work, finding one should take top priority. The top regret we've heard from new CLOs around their first anniversary in-role is that they didn't make talent decisions sooner, neglecting to put the right people in the right roles, reorganizing the team, or separating individuals who are difficult or have skills that aren't aligned to department needs.

Not all CLOs are interested in transitioning away from guardian and operator roles, as they've become comfortable in those roles and well rewarded for them over time. But the failure to transition can be interpreted by the rest of the C-suite as an inability to contribute on a strategic, executive level. A successful transition, however, creates opportunities for competitive advantage—both for the business and the legal leader.

Lori Lorenzo is managing director at Deloitte Transactions and Business Analytics LLP and leader of Deloitte's chief legal officer program, focusing on how general counsel and legal teams can elevate their careers.