Transforming legal services: from lawyers to leader with Matthew Layton, ex-Managing Partner at Clifford Chance, and Dan Kayne, Founder of O-Shaped and Janet Taylor-Hall, CEO, Cognia.
The need to respond to an increasing number of external crises and internal restructuring makes leadership skills key as the GC sits at the C-suite table. While legal expertise remains essential, GCs are being called upon to contribute to leadership, strategic thinking, and business alignment. This shift highlights the value of a broader skillset enabling GCs to move beyond legal execution and play a more integrated role as business partners and organisational leaders.
With this context in mind, we discussed the journey from trainee to client relationship partner in a law firm and trainee to GC in-house and the development of these key skills in the process.
Here are the key takeaways:
From lawyer to leader:
Traditional legal career paths tend to emphasise deep technical expertise. While important, this is no longer sufficient.
Leadership now requires a mix of emotional intelligence, relationship-building, and empowerment of others.
Moving beyond the “legal swim lane” into broader business territory is essential for impact.
Adapting to change:
The pace of change whether it be geopolitical, technological, and economic is ongoing, therefore developing resilience and continuous learning habits becomes critical.
Understanding your personal response to change and how to navigate uncertainty is key which means blending analytical thinking with emotional connection, awareness, and influence.
Leveraging technology and data:
Data is becoming central to legal leadership. There’s a growing push to quantify the value legal brings to the business.
Legal leaders are encouraged to become more data-savvy by using insights to support strategy, measure impact, and communicate effectively with stakeholders.
AI and emerging tech are reshaping the legal landscape, but leaders often lack clarity, training, or support to fully embrace these tools.
Rethinking talent and leadership development:
Legal talent is often narrowed into specialisms too early, limiting leadership development.
Broader experiences such as secondments, cross-functional exposure, and leadership training are critical for developing well-rounded leaders.
Leadership development shouldn’t be reserved for the top, training should cascade through the legal organisation to build future-ready teams.
Collaboration across the legal ecosystem:
There’s a growing need to bridge the gap between in-house teams, law firms and alternative legal service providers through better communication, shared leadership goals, and co-created value.
It was suggested that multidisciplinary leadership training (e.g. inhouse, law firm and ALSP) and cross-functional working (e.g. with finance, tech, ops) are key to future success.
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