With seismic shifts in geopolitics, economic pressures, regulatory regimes, global supply chains, and technology—mirrored by changing societal values and community expectations—the role of the General Counsel (GC) is transforming rapidly.
Today’s GC is not just a legal advisor but may also be a commercial executive, strategist, risk manager, innovation enabler, and guardian of ethics, compliance, and corporate reputation.
These changes are influencing not only the current landscape of legal leadership but also shaping how the next generation of lawyers is recruited and how they prepare to future-proof their legal careers.
Essential qualities for GCs: adaptability, curiosity, and strategic agility
At Peerpoint we’re increasingly hearing our clients tell us that technical expertise and the ability to manage an ever-expanding ‘in-tray’ under tight deadlines are now considered business-as-usual within their in-house legal teams. Today’s legal professionals need to be agile, curious, and able to pivot with the business.
Organizations are seeking lawyers who are commercially minded, can engage with the wider business, build strong relationships, and collaborate to identify and appropriately quantify risk and risk appetite. At the same time, GCs and senior legal leaders must build trust and credibility with their teams, their organization, and, where appropriate, external stakeholders. The leaders I speak to, including our clients, operate across multiple jurisdictions, often with limited in-person contact, which means they have to navigate diversity and geographic boundaries, and embrace workplace flexibility, while still confidently challenging and testing legal work across regions.
Some GCs are also introducing clear qualitative or quantitative KPIs aligned with their organization’s strategic objectives, embedding lawyers within the business, and internally profiling legal successes to demonstrate value.
Legal excellence amidst resource constraints
Many of our clients, including corporates, financial institutions, and government agencies are being asked to tighten their budgets and do more with less and this has been a challenge for some time. Add to this, ongoing organizational restructuring and rationalization, the days of simply adding more lawyers to solve problems are over and the need for lawyers to leverage technology including artificial intelligence (AI), data analytics, and operational excellence is now an essential requirement.
For smaller organizations with limited technology budgets, the need for a clearer strategic focus and process optimization has become even more critical. For example, the use of data analytics to assess workflows, leveraging templates, playbooks, and team mailboxes, as well as proactively addressing pressure points and training non-legal staff to self-manage low-complexity, high-volume matters.
Legal teams in these smaller businesses may also need to become more multidisciplinary, so making the right hiring decisions and upskilling individuals even more important.
Harnessing AI to shape legal operations
While most organizations vary in their AI maturity, many of our clients and the broader legal sector now recognize AI as a tool that can help free up legal teams from low-complexity, business-as-usual tasks, such as document review, legal research, contract lifecycle management, and compliance. The decision to ‘buy or build’ AI solutions is front of mind for a lot of them. For others, the temptation to delay the adoption of AI can be countered by growing awareness that:
- Employees are already using AI—sometimes inappropriately—raising concerns about responsible, ethical, and transparent use.
- AI must be trained (and may initially produce errors or ‘hallucinations’), as must the people using it.
- AI must evolve with regulatory frameworks. The Australian Government has already legislated the AI in Government Policy, released AI model clauses for procurement, and is considering a modern regulatory framework aligned with international standards.
Legal leaders within organizations may also need to bridge the gap between legal, IT, and the board demonstrating AI’s value, building confidence in its use, facilitating responsible adoption, and managing data privacy and security risks.
From legal advisor to strategic leader
With GCs increasingly being part of executive leadership teams, they have a valuable opportunity not just to support their business’ strategy but to also help shape it. This allows them to act as risk architects—identifying and mitigating risk, co-designing technologies and frameworks, and protecting their organization’s corporate reputation.
Some of the GCs I speak to also straddle legal, regulatory, and commercial roles, raising questions around legal professional privilege and ethical responsibilities. For example, many of our GC clients in the financial services space now manage a combination of legal, legal operations, compliance and governance as well as company secretarial roles. Equally, some GC clients have springboarded into general manager or executive roles. The Star Casino litigation has expanded regulatory expectations, highlighting lawyers’ roles in preventing misconduct. Financial literacy is also becoming essential for GCs to understand the business, seize commercial opportunities, and assess risk. This may entail making decisions during times of uncertainty while scanning the horizon for emerging threats as well as opportunities.
The changing nature of legal recruitment and career paths for lawyers
To position themselves as leaders in the recruitment process and in their own careers, GC’s and the next generation of lawyers will also need to exhibit the attributes mentioned above, as well as the new technology skills such as prompt engineering (the process of guiding AI to generate the desired output), as they increasingly work alongside AI and other platforms.
As the line between legal and commercial continues to blur, tomorrow’s lawyers need to be financially literate and demonstrate an understanding of their employer’s strategic objectives and operations, while being open to upskilling and wearing multiple hats.
With continuing globalization, legal talent will need to be sourced across regions and internationally, and the lawyers that have multi-jurisdictional qualifications will be increasingly in demand.
Additionally, growing cost pressures and workloads paralleled by decreasing budgets will create an increasing opportunity for lawyers to provide fractional, interim, or ad hoc resourcing solutions to in-house legal teams to solve for peak periods, resourcing gaps, special projects or enabling start-ups or fledging organizations to build capacity.
As each hire becomes more critical, especially in smaller organizations, GCs may increasingly turn to flexible resourcing solutions. This approach allows for careful consideration of seniority, skill mix, working patterns, and cultural fit, ensuring that legal teams are equipped to meet evolving business needs. By collaborating closely with resourcing partners, GCs can access creative, tailored solutions that support their strategic objectives.
