Outside counsel hoping to become a general counsel should transition to an in-house role before their sixth year, a veteran recruiter says. If they wait longer than that, they’ll be competing with lawyers with equivalent experience but who also have two or three years of in-house work behind them.

“Nine times out of 10, my clients have a strong bias for the person who has already transitioned in-house,” Dimitri Mastrocola, an executive recruiter with Major, Lindsey & Africa, said in a webcast hosted by contract management software company Lexion. “It’s not because they have better substantive skills, although they might; it’s because they’ve transitioned to practicing in an in-house environment, honing those soft skills that you can only learn in-house. That's the key distinction.”

If an attorney is later in their career, they’re probably going to find more success moving into a GC role by networking, said Deborah Solmor, a long-time outside counsel who later moved into in-house GC roles and later founded Ready Set GC, an organization supporting women legal leaders.  

“I went to breakfast with someone who told me the way you’re going to get a job is you’re going to meet someone and it’s going to be top-of-mind and they’re going to need someone and your name is going to come up,” she said. “That is exactly what happened to me.”

Solmor said she interviewed to be chief compliance officer in an organization after having worked in a law firm for almost two decades. She decided she didn’t want the job, but the GC she spoke with reached out a year later with an opportunity for her to head up litigation. She took the job and then parlayed that into later GC roles. 

“That’s how I got [the] job,” she said, “by staying on people’s radar screen.” 

Critical soft skills 

Any lawyer who’s a serious GC candidate will bring substantive legal skill to the job, so the differentiator between those who get the job and succeed and those who don’t are soft skills, said Solmor. 

Soft skills include the ability to read the organization's culture, communicate well, build relationships and inspire trust — all attributes that aren’t typically accentuated in law firms. 

“Understanding culture doesn’t sound like a skill but it drives everything,” she said. “It drives risk tolerance. It drives whether you fit in.”

To build soft skills, it can help to work with an executive coach, said Mastrocola. A coach can conduct a formal assessment to identify gaps to be filled.

Soft skills were key to her getting her latest GC role, said Judi Otteson, GC of autonomous delivery company Gatik AI. 

“I met the CEO for coffee,” Otteson said. “They hadn’t had a GC. I said I want to create a kinder, gentler legal department, because I don’t want people to be afraid to talk to legal. People get nervous. That’s bad for the company because you want to know of potential issues and if people are afraid to talk to legal, you have to clean up problems afterwards.”

Trust building is a big part of what GCs do everyday, Otteson said. “If the CEO or board doesn’t trust you, you can’t be effective,” she said. “You don’t want management making these big decisions without having legal at the table, so soft skills are the most valuable.”

A GC also must have commercial acumen — knowing how the company makes money and legal’s role in supporting that — and should be numerate, because anyone on the executive team must be able to talk the language of financial statements. “You need to be facile with numbers,” Mastrocola said. 

GCs also need to be generalists. Lawyers typically leverage a legal specialty to get to a senior position, but once they take the top role, they need to leave the legal work to others so they can focus on strategy.

“If you’re in an assistant or deputy GC role and you find yourself working in a narrow area of competency, you need to broaden your experience to encompass things like transactions, labor and employment, litigation, regulatory and compliance and technology,” Mastrocola said. 

Toughing it out

Whether someone should take a first job as GC even if it’s not under the best circumstances is a tricky question, the legal specialists said.

If the job has a lot of red flags — the GC doesn’t report to the CEO but to a lower position, like the CFO, for example, or the budget doesn’t appear to be sufficient to run the legal function optimally — it’s a risky job to take. The person gets the title but not the structure for the role to be a true leadership position.

“I would advise walking away if the GC reports to the CFO,” said Mastrocola. “It suggests a poor corporate governance structure. For many candidates when they see that, it’s a non-starter. The GC is a peer to the CFO and they should be partners, from a governance perspective. The GC needs to have privileged conversations with the CEO, untainted by financial concerns.”

On the other hand, getting that first GC title, even if it’s not in an optimal situation, can lead to a better opportunity later. 

Otteson said she got her first GC role while doing legal work in-house under suboptimal conditions. After abandoning a search for a GC, the CEO asked her to do the duties but without the title or the support that would typically go with the job. After talking to recruiters about what to do, she agreed to stay on under the condition that she and the CEO would agree to a path that would get her the official role over time.  

“Recruiters advised that, if you have a path to get that title, then you should probably stick it out,” she said. “I think that was good advice. I asked the CEO what I needed to do to become GC, and he gave me a list. I said I wanted regular meetings to make sure I’m doing everything he wanted me to do. It took two years of perseverance, but I got the title for a public company and that definitely opens doors. I’ve had two GC roles since.”