General counsel and chief legal officers are struggling to engage with other lawyers in their legal departments—even those who are being groomed to take on in-house leadership roles, according to a new report from Deloitte. 

"Maybe we're not taking enough responsibility as leaders for the way that we structure our environment or ecosystem within the legal department," said Lori Lorenzo, managing director of Deloitte's chief legal officer program. 

The Big Four accounting firm's "Chief Legal Officers and Leadership" report is based, in part, on phone interviews with 101 pairs of predominantly U.S.-based in-house leaders and lawyers that those same leaders identified as rising stars in their corporate legal departments. 

The report also examined data from a Zenger Folkman survey of more than 122,000 executives in telecom, hospitality, banking, health care and legal sectors. The survey found that the employee engagement disconnect is far more pronounced in legal departments than in any of the other included industries.

Photo courtesy of Deloitte

But E. Leigh Dance, a management consultant for global corporate legal departments and president of ELD International, was skeptical. 

"I meet with general counsel mostly and I find that their connection to their team is really close and really interactive, by necessity," she said. "Generally, my impression has been that general counsel are very involved one to two levels down." 

During the Deloitte interviews, GCs and CLOs were asked to identify their aspiring leaders' top three leadership strengths. In separate discussions, the aspiring leaders were asked to list their own leadership strengths. 

Of all the participants, only one pair gave answers that were completely aligned, according to Lorenzo. The primary disconnect, she said, was that most aspiring leaders thought of themselves as strategic business partners, while the actual leaders said the lower-level lawyers still needed to develop that skill. 

Lorenzo suggested that the misalignment could be a "matter of perspective and definition. From a CLO's more elevated view, the way a strategic business partnership looks is perhaps different than if you're the head of litigation or the GC of a division." 

She noted that top lawyers said in the interviews that their proteges needed to build stronger relationships with leaders throughout the company before they could move into higher roles within the legal department.  

Dance, the consultant, said general counsel often want to give the stars of their legal teams the opportunity to present to the board of directors or take on other leadership responsibilities that provide exposure to the C-suite.

"Many of them will try, but a lot of times the director will say, 'No, we want you, the GC,'" she added. "I see deputies to GCs often being overlooked when the top person leaves because they aren't perceived by the executive team as someone who could fill their shoes."

Another disconnect emerged when the interviewees were asked to list the top three areas that rising leaders should be focused on for development. Most of the lower-level lawyers identified technical savvy—a skill that wasn't on the radar of most CLOs. 

"I want to do more research about why there is that disconnect," Lorenzo said. "But this is interesting, especially in what I call the age of legal transformation." 

Leaders should be looking more closely at legal technology as a way to make legal departments more efficient but also as an opportunity to engage with their in-house lawyers by, for instance, giving them the chance to develop new skills or take on different responsibilities. 

"CLOs have a wonderful opportunity right now," Lorenzo said. "We're in a place where we can be thinking differently about what it looks like to work in-house and the types of training we give our lawyers access to and the types of learning, development and practice experiences that we provide."