Dive Brief:

• Forty-two percent of managing counsel and 11% of senior counsel say they’ve been told they’re a potential successor to the general counsel, a survey by executive search and advisory firm BarkerGilmore finds. 
• If their organization has a deputy GC role, they might want to seek out that role first; almost 60% of identified successors are deputy GCs, similar to 2023 data.
• Being tapped as a potential GC successor isn’t a way to keep managing counsel from looking at other opportunities; almost 60% of them say they continue to look outside their organization for a top role. Most senior counsel tapped as a potential successor, by contrast, say they’re staying put. 

Dive Insight:

The survey shows there’s a virtuous cycle between being named a potential GC successor and getting executive coaching, and vice versa. 

About a third of in-house counsel, regardless of title, identified as a potential successor are given executive coaching, and these counsel overwhelmingly say the coaching is helpful to them. Most of the coaching is done by an external provider. 

At the same time, the roughly one-third of counsel who receive executive coaching are more likely to be identified as a potential successor. 

“In-house counsel that have received executive coaching are more likely to be identified as a successor than their counterparts without executive coaching,” the report says.

As a general matter, managing counsel tend to get more professional development opportunities of all kinds than senior counsel, but once someone is identified as a potential successor, they tend to get the most opportunities of all. 

The biggest opportunities, regardless of where someone is in his or her career, is an expanded scope of responsibilities followed by increased board and C-suite exposure, leadership training and stretch assignments. All of those ratchet up significantly once someone is identified as a potential successor. 

Other findings

Managing counsel are far more likely than senior counsel to be recruited, either directly by the organization or an executive recruiter or by a friend or colleague, while senior counsel are more likely to answer a job posting.  

Taking a GC role is the ambition of virtually all managing counsel and senior counsel, and most of them let management know that that’s what they want. 

Neither managing counsel nor senior counsel spend a lot of time in their roles, typically fewer than two years.