Reflections and notes from WIPL UK

Last week, Heriot Brown sponsored the Women, Influence & Power in Law UK conference. It was a great two days with insightful panels and the chance to catch up and meet some fantastic female lawyers.

I loved especially how many people mentioned the power of networking and growing a support system amongst each other was delighted to host a WhatsApp group to help facilitate this at the event. If you'd like to hear more let me know!

I took so many notes and thought that I'd share them below, along with the session title and description.

Proving Your Value: Living in the Seat You Earned

As female legal leaders, we’ve made it but questioning our achievements despite one’s abilities and credentials is a common mindset affliction. In a male-dominated working environment, it is even more important as women to understand the importance of exuding confidence, owning your power, and being comfortable as a legal leader. As female legal leaders, knowing your worth is essential to future growth, earning trust and respect, and enhances your ability to lead. Join this session as expert panellists share their struggles and best practices in owning your seat, consistently providing value to the organization, and how to strive for bigger and better opportunities.

Speakers: Kimberley Whitaker , Lorna J Gibb , Leigh Kirkpatrick , Annabel Tagoe-Bannerman , Dulcie Daly

Notes and take-aways:

• Be vocal about successes even if it doesn’t come naturally – otherwise no-one know about them! Especially when everything is going well.
• It’s important to take on feedback and learn from it – don’t be defensive
• Be authentic and show vulnerability
• You need to make mistakes to improve
• Think about “where am I know?” “how do people perceive me?” – it’s good to test this and how you come across so you know how your landing with people.
• Ask for feedback from those you trust – “what do I need to work on?”
• Be open to what you need to learn and put your hand up for opportunities to do so.
• “what got you there, won’t keep you there”
• Address what is you and what is not you and then lead into opportunities – don’t focus on “I can’t do X,Y,Z” and focus on what interests you and you could learn.
• What you are going to do to drive the business forward? What’s driving the CEO/shareholders and show how you can help
• You shouldn’t just be the lawyer in the room.
• Think about who the decision makers and who the influencers are? Who is actually going to be in the room and get to know them on the outside.
• Every time they interact with you, you don’t want them to be thinking “that’s X, the lawyer” you want them to think “that’s X the business woman”
• Being In-House is all about building these relationships
• “social capital” is how well you connect with people
• Carla Harris talks about performance currency and relationship currency
• People want to know you’re human – authentic – we do make mistakes but what thoughts/ideas I bring to the table carry weight.
• Every interaction is important, whether that’s with the CEO or someone on the factory floor.
• Women are often the ones silenced in meetings – consider your inclusion standards and ensure that it’s not just the same voices always being heard.
• If you can’t attend something, send someone in your team in your place so the legal voice is still present but also as a learning opportunity for who you send – they might find it intimidating but it’s invaluable learning.
• Think about what your value proposition is – the stronger sense of self you have, the better the opportunities you’ll have.

Scalable Legal Ops Strategies: Meeting the Changing Conditions of Business

With business pressures increasing, in-house lawyers should be thinking ahead about how to integrate Legal Ops frameworks into their everyday workflows. In this session, we’ll use a forward-looking scope to evaluate the smart strategies for scaling your Legal Ops department, and review lessons learned along the way. Discover innovative ways to transform the way in-house teams provide legal services to the business and learn the key areas to focus on from financial management, human resources, analytics, and data and which strategies yield the optimum results for the legal department.

Speakers: Zoe Feller , Sandy Scott , Sharon Evans , Martyna Budzynska

Notes and take-aways:

• What is legal ops? It’s everything you do to work more efficiently so you can automate the repetitive/low value matters and concentrate and interesting ones. This can relate to resourcing, self-service tools as examples.
• Legal operations is dependant on adapting to the business – how do legal plug into other operations?
• It’s about how to ensure that the right person is doing the right work at the right time?
• When you say legal ops, there’s often as assumption that you mean that you want to buy something expensive.
• Leading onto how to ask for a budget?
• Sit down with the leadership team and find out what’s coming for the business – what are the plans/ambitions – is this new products? New jurisdictions?
• From there, say how much additional headcount legal will require to support this. The business will answer no, you can’t have that.
• From here, well to achieve this we could invest in this tool – it’ll take longer but be less expensive.
• Do your research – sometimes the tech exists in your company already so speak to IT and find out what they and other departments use already – how do they manage their workflow?
• One speaker spoke about using Jira as a workflow management tool. This allowed them to gather data on how many tickets/matter were resolved and what speed – nice to give the team these stats and the business was happy as it was a tool already used in the business.
• Start small and with figures.
• You need to be good at pushing a number against something without being precise (that’s what other depts do!) so you can say “it will save you ￡X” in the moment it’s being discussed.
• Have you pin-pointed the problem you’re trying to resolve? Tech is good if it’s answering a problem but if you haven’t mapped out what the problem is, you can risk investing in tech too early and it actually not solving what you want it to (as you weren’t 100% sure what this was).
• Take a step back to consider how to approach, who should be involved, what will the process be? Provide clarity on paper for both the team and the business so you don’t waste any time on the basics by everyone knowing the plan/process.
• Development/training of the team – avoid having one expert for each area/part – although it’s good to have one business partner for clarity in the business, it’s good to ensure that others in the team are aware and know about that area – this helps to future proof for leavers but also takes stress away from people taking their annual leave or being unwell that others are able to cover.
• Create playbooks with tips and concrete directions. Try using scenarios that people can relate to with a complimentary commentary on the process.
• Training for the business, i.e. what is IP? Why is it important? Where does it sit?

Emerging ESG Related Risks

As regulations, enforcement and expectations continue to evolve quickly around various ESG matters, in-house counsel needs to align the goals of their organizations and help strategize the best plan of action to mitigate risks to come. This session will cover emerging ESG-related issues and risks that GCs and businesses should be considering, as well as what structures need to be in place to make sure organisations are where they need to be. Panellists will touch upon crisis response frameworks GCs may wish to consider implementing should one of these risks materialize and will also provide a clear path for manoeuvring environmental disclosures, from the proposed SEC Climate Rule and Global Mandatory regimes to carbon pricing scenario analysis, target setting, net zero standards and examining science-based targets.

Speakers: Belinda Ellington , Melissa Darby , Karen Lawrie , Sheena Singla , Charlie Johnstone

Notes and take-aways:

• ESG means different things for different people - Many focus on the E but for example one panellist, supply chain transparency is important so her focus is more on the S and G.
• Who has the ownership?
• There’s lots of regulation so you need to consider what elements are relevant to you and your business? Then communicate this internally and to the market – “our business is focussing on this aspect of ESG because of XYZ”
• How do you monitor success? Although this isn’t legal’s responsibility, it makes sense for legal to set the processes and rules.
• You don’t want to have more severe governance thank your competitors but also not be too far behind the pack in setting objectives.
• Embrace change and educating – this is till a growing area with lots of info out there. We need to know this terminology and that means educating yourself.

Risk

• How do you measure the effectiveness of the risks that you save the company from?
• ?Dealing with conflicts – one project could conflict with another, eg. An environmental project but in a country with a lack of human rights.
• The higher the risk, the higher the investment.
• The real risk is we get it wrong
• There’s also the reputational risk – you don’t want to overstate and run the risk of looking like you’re green washing.
• Be transparent that the info/data is not 100%. All companies are saying it’s a working progress – having to update data later is better than saying nothing now.

Finding the Path to GC: Growing from Important Career Lessons and Accomplishing Your Goals

This session will provide a unique opportunity to hear from female business leaders who will share the highs and lows of their journeys, retrospective insights, and career-defining moments. Join this inspirational panel as they advise on the GC career trajectory and provide guidance on how to effectively elevate your in-house career.

Speakers: Habiba Cullen-Jafar , Georgina McManus , Bea Miyamoto , Sharmin Takin

Notes and take-aways:

• There are two transition points, first when you make the move from private practice to in-house and the second when you become the GC.
• You’re no longer the profit centre bring in the revenue as your expertise are the product. This means that now, not everything revolves around you.
• This is not to say that you are now a cost entre though! I liked how one panellist called legal an enabling function instead as you are enabling the company to grow and succeed.
• There is now no guaranteed YoY promotion/salary inflation – you’re now off the escalator in private practice where each year your PQE increases as does your salary. You are now in charge of your own career path.
• Ask yourself what you are empowered to do and what you’re not
• Other expertise is needed – learn to speak the language of the business, overcome struggles with talking about financials.
• It’s a process making the move.
• Tip: networking internally – find out who calls the shots for what, who’s decision really counts, who is in the decision making process.
• Be proactive around ensure people know that they can come to you for help (and not just about legal things)
• You don’t want that first interaction to be because of a crisis so if you’ve gotten to know them before, that’s better.
• In-house is a very flat structure, meaning a lot of the time you’re waiting to fill dead man’s shoes.
• Life/Work balance Tip: wake up twice, once in the morning and off to work and once at the end of work before going home so you don’t give all of yourself to work and none to your family.

I also had the chance to attend an IWD panel hosted by Juro and Beamery last week so also including some key points that I learned here.

International Women’s Day: embrace equity panel

Speakers: Adeola A. , Mary Bonsor , Stephanie Dominy , Chantelle Zemba , Katie Obi

Notes:

• Businesses need to take concrete measures more than celebrating specific days/setting up groups.
• Data: how many women are in leadership?
• Recruitment: how many candidates are from X, Y, Z backgrounds? Is there diversity in the shortlist? On the other side, ensure interview panels are also diverse to limit unconscious bias.
• Evaluate: re-evaluate quarterly to asses progress/lack there of and make a plan.
• Set goals?
• You are who you are – you need to be accepting of that – check yourself for bias too.
• Be curious and want to understand.
• Legal should lead by example, approach from a diverse cognitive way.
• Push advisers to have more diverse teams when pitching RFP but hold them to account that the diversity sticks after they win your business. Is that diversity consistent in meetings going forward?
• Legal are the guardians of the company’s morals and values.
• How many GCs sit on their boards? It makes sense to be a part of these conversations from the top.
• Advice – reach out to your CPO/HR teams and find out what initiatives they’re working on that you could help with – they can feel lonely and would value your help.
• “what gets you there isn’t going to keep you there” – I thought that as long as I was a brilliant lawyer, I’d be fine. It’s about how to manage stakeholders, shareholders etc. your legal skills are a given, it’s what else you bring to the role. Advice: Get familiar with your CFO and learn their language – a better financial understanding will help you to support the business.
• Be brave! Being fearful and feeling out of your depth will happen but have the courage to push through and know it’s ok to feel uncomfortable whilst you learn.
• Learn to be a holistic problem solver than a lawyer – if you think this way, you’ll not be limited to solving problems using the law but your wider expertise. There are X number of things you need to consider and the law is just one.
• Women often struggle to ask for help but if we don’t ask, you run the risk of struggling in silene and potentially drowning.
• To be a great leader, you need to show vulnerability. This helps to build trust so be open when you’re not sure and ask for help when you need it.
• Mentorship is a great tool but be specific on how long you want to work together, What issues/problems do you want to solve? Set rules and deadlines, don’t approach potential mentors cold. It’s useful to be mentored by someone not too far ahead of you in the career – two levels above is a sweet spot.
• Networking - Everyone you meet at events, stay connected. By the time you realise that you need a network it’s too late so take action early on.

This panel ended with each speaker sharing one piece of advice they wish they knew earlier on in their career

1. There’s more than one way to do things
2. Networking is important and you need to start building as early as possible
3. Just ask – you’ll find people are generous with their time
4. It’s alright not to know everything.