Bringing in-house legal into the heart of your business

A huge thank you to everyone who joined the Boyes Turner team at our second in-person conference for General Counsel and Heads of Legal.

The conference is very much designed to support our in-house community, bringing people together to explore key issues shaping in-house legal roles. 2024’s theme explored how to embed your in-house legal team into the heart of your business to deepen collaboration, agility and compliance across core organisational functions.

Once again, the full day programme comprised a series of interactive panels featuring thought leaders from across the sector, and break-out sessions to share insight and experiences with our in-house network. To deepen our understanding, attendees were invited to respond to a survey about the issues as well.

We kicked off the day with a session on ESG – how legal teams can help drive the change whilst managing risk. ESG emerged as an area where in-house legal teams feel they can add value to the business. A key challenge is how overall responsibility for ESG sits in different places within different businesses, affecting our ability to drive change as we seek to support our businesses in improving their impact.

Those in multinational organisations also must deal with the challenge of applying different standards across different jurisdictions, as well as an increasing number of regulatory investigations in some countries which adds an additional layer of complexity. 

When asked how in-house teams can do more, suggestions included actively encouraging and emphasising compliance requirements, risk and opportunities to the business as well as supporting proactive initiatives such as training, processes and policy creation. As with many things on a GC’s desk, being able to demonstrate value to the bottom line is often seen as a way of pushing change.

Impact was top of the agenda for the second panel session, exploring ED&I - how legal teams can support ED&I initiatives within their organisations. The session aimed to unpack how legal teams can support the development and implementation of ED&I strategies within both the legal team and throughout the wider business, to create genuinely inclusive workplaces.

Allyship, culture shifts, breaking through systemic blocks, senior representation and modelling together with engaging with ED&I partners were all highlighted as key to success.

Our survey found that in-house teams have the opportunity to lead on social inclusion within the legal profession through more widespread adoption of apprenticeship programmes. GCs are also in a position of being able to raise the topic at executive level meetings and to support the business in modelling change, as an essential rather than a “nice to have”.

We ended the day with a discussion on affordable and innovative legal tech, redirecting the focus from the all-encompassing AI agenda, to how technology can drive value and improvement in an accessible, affordable and tangible way.

The discussion found that adoption of “legaltech” remains relatively low and introducing tech of any kind can present challenges. The key issue identified was making the business case to justify the additional costs and internal overheads and getting budget approval.

Going deeper into our survey, we found there are concerns about capacity within the legal team to drive implementation and to be able to take time away from the “day job” to support the changes needed for a successful roll-out.

As with any IT implementation, the importance of change management was recognised. The need to ensure buy in of those within the team and for the business to adopt new processes were both considerations.

Thanks for everyone who made the day the success it was.