Companies constantly add products and services, fueled by opportunity, technology and competition. They also continually grow into new geographic markets and contract in others. Often local legal talent is needed, because even though many businesses are now global, much of the law is still local. For years, legal ­functions have built local legal and compliance capability in their key markets. It's a way to resolve the difficulty, cost and risk of delivering legal services to countries and cultures with diverse business practices and legal regimes.

Depending on the company's growth strategy, in-house legal leaders do this by retaining outside advisers, hiring in-house professionals, or both. Building and managing a productive and high-performing international legal team is very demanding. In our 2017 Benchmark of global companies headquartered worldwide (three-quarters of them publicly listed), 100 percent have in-house lawyers on the ground internationally. Nearly half have corporate counsel in more than 20 jurisdictions.

It's challenging to find local legal professionals that meet your needs, standards and can adapt to your approach. Training and retaining good people takes time and effort. Here are practical recommendations from international legal and compliance pros. The insights come from May-June conversations, at the Transatlantic GC Summit organized by American Lawyer in London; in Chicago and Paris roundtables with ­multinational in-house leaders; at an event of Major, Lindsay & Africa (MLA), a global legal recruiting and search firm.

Building an International Legal Team

• First, determine what the business needs from legal in that location. Then clarify the skill set you want. Faulty hiring decisions can be a real setback. Naveen Tuli, based in New Delhi, India, leads MLA's in-house practice in Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia Pacific. Tuli emphasizes the importance of “understanding market conditions and typical salaries, before you jump in and start hiring.” In North America, it's common practice to hire talent with strong corporate counsel experience. In EMEA and Asia Pacific, it's more typical to hire directly from law firms, since it can be harder to find legal talent with corporate experience.