Lawyers can’t manage,” many attorneys hear from peers and, more unpleasantly, from their direct reports. Nevertheless, when in-house attorneys are asked to manage a legal department, they must strive to disprove this bromide.
Firm practice and law school do not teach many of the skills in-house legal managers need to succeed. At firms, new lawyers start their careers in an environment unfamiliar to businesspeople — a world where people avoid risk, billable hours dictate value, people rarely work in multidisciplinary teams and nobody makes a decision without reviewing stacks of memoranda.
