What a newly appointed GC should assess before adding external legal talent

A newly appointed general counsel should assess five things before adding external legal talent: what work comes in, what risks matter most, what the current team can and cannot do, what outside counsel is doing and costing, and who has the right to decide what. Treat sixty days as an illustrative assessment period. Add support earlier for a known gap or time-sensitive need; do not wait for a failure.

1. Demand: what work comes in

Gather three to twelve months of data, even if rough.

• Number and type of requests, and who sends them
• Contracts by type, value and turnaround
• Recurring questions that could be answered by a template or guide
• Projects in flight and promised
• Peaks and troughs

Ask the business what legal could do that it does not now. Needs the team never hears about are easy to miss.

2. Risk: what matters most

• Which risks have the largest consequence: regulatory, contractual, employment, privacy, intellectual property or disputes
• Open or threatened claims
• Known gaps in policies or contracts
• Audit or board concerns
• Commitments the company has made to customers or regulators

Rank them. Capacity should go first to the highest risks.

3. The team: what it can and cannot do

For each person, note strengths, workload, experience gaps and what they want to do. Look at:

• Capacity: how many hours of real work is the team delivering?
• Capability: what do you send outside because nobody can handle it?
• Knowledge: what lives in one person's head?
• Morale and attrition risk

4. Outside counsel and vendors

• Who is used for what, and why
• Spend by firm and matter type, and whether it is within budget
• Which work could be done in-house or by flexible capacity at a better cost
• Which work should stay with firms because of specialism or scale
• Terms: rates, staffing and billing practices

5. Decision rights and stakeholders

• Who approves what, and what is written down
• Where legal is called late
• Which executives are allies, and which are sceptical
• How legal is perceived: blocker, adviser or partner

Meet the key stakeholders early and ask what they need.

From assessment to a staffing model

Use what you found to choose.

• If the issue is volume of routine work, capacity is the answer. A part-time or embedded lawyer can take a defined queue.
• If the issue is a missing skill, bring in a specialist or fractional expert for that area.
• If the issue is direction, priorities and credibility, your own time and a clear plan matter more than extra people.
• If the issue is unpredictability, use flexible capacity that can scale, and revisit after a quarter.
• If outside spend is high, bring selected work in-house, or use flexible talent for recurring work and keep firms for specialist matters.

Helcim brought in a fractional general counsel through us to provide leadership and move projects forward while avoiding the wait for a full-time GC search. Your assessment may point to a different model. Compare the options against the work, decision ownership and capacity you need.

A sixty-day assessment worksheet

Record for each of the five areas:

• What you found, with numbers where you have them
• What surprised you
• What you will do in the first ninety days
• What you will not do yet

Then write a one-page plan: three priorities, the capacity you need, the model, the budget range and the review date.

Mistakes to avoid

• Hiring to fix a problem you have not measured
• Copying the structure of your last company
• Adding people before agreeing priorities with the CEO or sponsor
• Cutting outside counsel spend without checking what it covers
• Skipping the conversation with the team about what changes

The best first external hire is the one that fits what the assessment found, not the one you could find fastest.