General Counsel are often the people others turn to when things get difficult.
They advise executives through uncertainty, manage sensitive issues, support their teams through restructures and change, navigate workplace politics and are expected to remain calm when other people are looking for answers.
But who does the General Counsel talk to when they are the one dealing with the uncertainty?
In a recent episode of In-House Matters by Lawcadia, Lawcadia Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer Sacha Kirk spoke with Claire Bibby, senior lawyer, executive coach, Non-Executive Director and Co-Founder of Coaching Advocates, about the career and leadership challenges she sees senior lawyers navigating.
Claire has spent more than 30 years across in-house legal leadership, private practice, board roles, business and coaching. Through her coaching work she now sees lawyers dealing with everything from confidence and difficult conversations to organisational politics, career dissatisfaction, promotion and major career change.
What came through strongly in the conversation was that becoming more senior does not make those challenges disappear. In some respects, it makes them harder to talk about.
The More Senior You Become, the Harder it Can Be to Talk Candidly
Some of the hardest issues a General Counsel deals with cannot easily be discussed with their team.
Claire spoke about having to manage redundancies and performance terminations during her own time as a General Counsel. These are highly personal decisions with real consequences for the people involved, and the sensitive nature of this means the General Counsel may have very few places to talk through what they are dealing with.
“The more senior you get, the harder it is to find people that you can speak candidly with.”
A trusted peer can help, but they will have their own perspective on the organisation and the people involved. Friends and family know you well, but they are also naturally invested in you and what happens next.
For Claire, this is one of the reasons an independent coach can be useful.
“Our gig is essentially to make the invisible visible for them.”
A coach is not there to hand over the answer. Claire was clear that properly trained coaches should not be telling clients what to do. Much of the value comes from having somewhere confidential to say things out loud, challenge your own thinking and work through an issue without worrying about the organisational consequences of the conversation.
That can be difficult to find when you are sitting at the top of a legal function.
Leadership of Self Comes First
At Coaching Advocates, Claire and co-founder Lara Wentworth talk about leadership in three parts: leadership of self, leadership of people and leadership of the organisation.
Interestingly, many of the issues Claire sees start with the first one.
Seniority and confidence do not always arrive together.
Claire regularly works with highly accomplished lawyers who have reached senior positions and still find themselves thinking:
“What the hell am I doing in this room? How did I even get into this room?”
She sees a strong connection with the perfectionism common in the legal profession.
“There is a really common thread amongst lawyers, often because we are perfectionists, that we wonder, are we actually really good enough to be doing this sort of work?”
That uncertainty can exist alongside an impressive CV, years of experience and plenty of evidence that the person is very capable.
Leadership of people brings a different set of issues. Claire sees lawyers dealing with difficult conversations, different personality types and the transition from managing work to genuinely leading people.
Then there is leadership of the organisation, where politics, influence, relationships and the ability to understand what is happening around you become increasingly important.
For a General Counsel, all three can be happening at once.
You may be questioning your own decisions, managing a difficult conversation with a team member and trying to influence a challenging executive stakeholder in the same week.
Change Can Hit from Above and Below
Periods of restructuring can be particularly difficult for senior in-house lawyers.
The General Counsel may be helping the organisation navigate the change while also dealing with what it means for their own function.
People above them may be leaving. Roles within their team may be removed. Budgets may be cut. The team may still be expected to deliver the same amount of work with fewer people.
And the General Counsel still has to lead through it.
One of Claire’s strongest views is that senior professionals need to take some ownership of how they respond to these situations rather than waiting for someone else to resolve everything around them.
Her phrase throughout the conversation was:
“Nothing changes if nothing changes.”
As Claire put it:
“You can’t change the other person. You can’t generally change the organisation. You can only change yourself and the response that you have.”
That may mean dealing differently with a difficult stakeholder, changing how you lead the team, seeking outside support or, in some cases, deciding that the role itself is no longer right.
Claire’s advice was simple:
“Take control and pivot and try something different.”
That does not make difficult organisational situations easy. It does put some agency back with the individual rather than leaving their career entirely in the hands of the organisation.
Legal Careers Are Not Always as Secure or Linear as They Appear
Many senior lawyers have spent years following a fairly recognisable career path: lawyer, senior lawyer, Head of Legal, General Counsel, then perhaps a larger or more complex General Counsel role.
It can feel predictable and relatively secure.
But senior roles disappear too.
Claire spoke candidly about once believing that being a General Counsel in a large company represented a stable career path. Her own experience of redundancy forced her to rethink that assumption and eventually led to a much broader career across legal practice, coaching, board work and business.
Claire makes the point that career options can be much wider than they appear when you have spent a long time inside one organisation, one type of role or one professional circle.
This closed perspective is quite common with the lawyers Claire coaches.
Some know they are unhappy but have no idea what they would do instead. Others are interested in board roles, private practice, business or something outside traditional legal work but cannot yet see how their experience might translate.
As Claire observed:
“You can have a really closed view if your world is quite closed.”
Different experiences, people and environments can change that view.
They can also make the idea of a non-linear career feel considerably less risky.
Senior Progression Depends on More than Technical Expertise
For lawyers who do want to progress further within corporate life, Claire sees the capabilities required becoming broader as seniority increases.
Technical legal expertise remains important. But senior lawyers also need commercial experience, emotional intelligence, strong relationships and the ability to understand what is happening around them.
As Claire explained:
“In my view, depending on what area of law, you need to concentrate on your commercial experience, your life experience, your EQ, and learn to read the room better.”
Senior lawyers need to understand how decisions are actually being made, recognise the different personalities around the table and know how to communicate with each of them.
Claire sees this particularly clearly in her work as a Non-Executive Director.
When a lawyer comes into the boardroom, directors are generally not looking for someone to simply explain the legal issues.
“We want to hear the strategy. We want to hear how you’ve thought outside of the box.”
The lawyer needs to bring legal expertise into the broader discussion about risk, strategy and the organisation.
That can also mean knowing when not to fill the silence.
Claire described it as:
“Being in control of the room, understanding the nuances that are happening in the room, and sometimes knowing when to shut up.”
Listening, watching how people react and noticing the tension in a room can be just as important as making the next point.
For Claire, lawyers who progress successfully tend to offer something beyond technical legal capability. They understand the business, understand people and can contribute to a conversation at the level the organisation needs.
Your Network Needs to Extend Beyond Legal
Claire was equally direct about networking.
If a lawyer wants to move into a board role or expand their career beyond a conventional legal pathway, spending all their time networking with other lawyers is unlikely to be enough.
“It’s not your lawyer mates, it’s not the law firms that are going to open those doors for you.”
Claire points instead to relationships with C-suite executives, directors and other commercial leaders.
These are people who may have seen how you operate in a different context. They may know you as someone who thinks commercially, handles difficult situations well or brings a perspective that extends beyond the legal issue.
Those are often the people who later recommend someone for an opportunity.
Claire also made the point that networking is not about how many thousands of connections someone has accumulated.
She prefers going deeper with a smaller number of relationships rather than building a very wide but superficial network.
“If you want to get ahead in your career, it’s very few people that can get ahead alone.”
For senior lawyers, it is worth thinking about who knows your work outside Legal and what they would say about you if your name came up when you were not in the room.
Mentor, Sponsor or Coach?
The conversation also explored the different people who can support a lawyer throughout their career.
Claire has benefited from mentors and sponsors herself and sees considerable value in both.
But the roles are different.
A mentor generally shares their own experience and perspective. They may tell you how they handled a similar situation and provide advice based on what they have learnt.
A sponsor goes further.
Claire describes a sponsor as:
“The person who’s talking about you behind closed doors and is advocating for you.”
That person may put your name forward, promote your capability or help create an opportunity when you are not there to do it yourself.
A coach has a different role again.
“Coaching doesn’t come with those recommendations of what to do.”
The coach is there to help the person think through the issue rather than solve it for them.
In practice, senior lawyers may benefit from all three at different stages of their career.
They may also have a trusted friend, colleague or former executive who is prepared to tell them what other people will not.
Claire described having someone in her own career who would tell her what she needed to hear.
Those relationships are valuable precisely because seniority can otherwise make frank feedback harder to find.
Coaching Is Not Something You Need Because You Are Failing
One of the perceptions Claire would like to change is the idea that executive coaching is remedial.
She makes the comparison with sport.
“The better you get at sports, the more coaches you get, or the more senior coaches you get.”
Elite athletes are not given coaches because they are failing. They use them because they are already performing at a high level and want to improve further.
Claire believes executive coaching should be thought about in much the same way.
If an employee is not performing and needs to be told what needs to change, she sees that as the responsibility of their manager.
“That’s management; If you need to tell one of your staff something because they’re not performing, that’s your job, not ours.”
Coaching is doing something else.
“We’re there… to make the invisible visible, to help them see what they can’t see and get that extra 1%, 2%, 3%.”
For someone already operating at General Counsel, partner or executive level, a few percentage points can have a big impact.
It could be the confidence to handle a difficult conversation differently, greater awareness of how they are coming across in the room, a different approach to an internal political issue or clarity about a career decision they have been putting off.
Claire believes attitudes towards coaching are changing, although she sees stronger acceptance in parts of Europe and the United States than in Australia.
That raises an interesting question for senior lawyers.
We routinely accept spending money on conferences, qualifications and technical professional development. Perhaps leadership support and independent coaching should be considered in the same category: an investment in continuing to develop rather than a sign that something needs addressing.
Take More Ownership of Your Career
No one can completely control how their career develops.
Companies restructure. Leaders change. Roles disappear. Promotions go to somebody else. Opportunities sometimes arrive unexpectedly.
But Claire’s message is that senior lawyers still have considerable influence over what they do next.
That might mean deliberately developing commercial or leadership skills rather than another technical qualification.
It might mean building relationships outside Legal.
It might mean finding a mentor, sponsor or coach.
It might mean acknowledging that a role is no longer working and seriously considering other options.
And sometimes it simply means accepting that you need to be the person who makes the change.
As Claire put it:
“Sometimes you can be the only person who is in control of changing what needs changing in your life.”
Final Thoughts
The higher someone progresses in a legal career, the less likely it is that technical legal knowledge will be the only difficult part of the job.
The challenges become much more human: leading people, managing uncertainty, dealing with politics, building influence, handling difficult conversations, maintaining confidence and deciding where you want your career to go next.
At the same time, the pool of people with whom a General Counsel can speak completely candidly can get smaller.
That makes the relationships around senior lawyers worth thinking about deliberately.
Who will give you honest feedback? Who will advocate for you when you are not in the room? Who understands the commercial side of what you do? Who can help you see something differently when you are too close to the issue yourself?
There is no single person who needs to fill all of those roles.
But seniority is not a reason to stop seeking support. If anything, it may be when that support becomes most useful.