Working on Legal Week Law, our new online library of briefings and reports, has given me a chance to take a much closer look at the kind of material being published by law firms. The quality varies enormously, though is generally higher than a neutral observer might expect. One of the most interesting reports I have yet seen is Nabarro's From In-House Lawyer to Business Counsel.

It caught my eye not so much because of the area it covers – charting the rising influence of in-house lawyers has become pretty well-trodden ground – but because it brings a welcome dose of reality to a subject too often viewed through rose-tinted glasses.

Taken at face value, the rhetoric in some material aimed at the in-house community would lead you to believe that general counsel have been matching or overtaking other 'c-suite' executives in recent years in clout and cash. But while the in-house profession has developed considerably, and on balance the recession appears to have further strengthened the hand of general counsel, such claims are as yet premature.

As the Nabarro report stresses, there remain huge cultural and structural barriers in most companies to in-house legal teams breaking out of the narrow support function role they are perceived as holding. But with a more ambitious breed of in-house lawyer hoping to move up the pecking order in major corporates, it appears some senior in-house counsel are intent on genuinely escaping the support staff ghetto.

The report also makes a decent attempt to codify the current duties of in-house lawyers into four levels, with the most strategically valuable at the top. While only 3% of canvassed lawyers felt their work was currently making the top level, 29% hope to make it by 2015.

Getting there, of course, is the challenge. The report argues that the ability to demonstrate and project commercial value, rather than just control risks and costs, will be key to winning this campaign. It is a fair point – for this reason, there will surely also need to be a huge expansion in the use and application of benchmarking tools for in-house legal teams.

The report also touches on a more basic but less articulated factor: in-house lawyers need to get a much better grip on workplace politics and the all-important art of how to get things done. Actually, I would have liked the report to have contained a bit more on the practical street-fighting skills needed for career progression, as too many GCs still strike me as institutionally naive. But in frankly acknowledging the challenges facing the new breed of in-house lawyers, Nabarro has made a respectable addition to the debate on the evolving role of general counsel.