The legal team supports every business unit in some way, from HR onboarding to sales closed. Even after you identify, track, and present specific metrics that quantify high performance, there’s another bridge to cross – and it can prove just as challenging.
In general, colleagues judge legal based on recent interactions. For a rep pushing last-minute deals, legal’s reputation hinges on contract turnaround – a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately scenario.
In this blog series, we’ll cover the tactics for legal leaders looking to boost their departments’ reputations (and team morale). These tips will help deliver legal teams the distinction they deserve. Let’s go!
Embrace story-telling (and story-listening).
You cannot provide legal support in a vacuum. Instead, encourage your team to build relationships across each department at the company. Learn what your fellow colleagues need, where they struggle, and what types of support matters the most to them. What are their main pain points? Can you assist with a solution to any of them? Within these conversations, legal can connect the dots between projects and initiatives and illustrate how these add value to another business unit.
For example, sales and legal may agree on the need to speed up contract creation. This presents a suitable time for legal to propose a deal cycle accelerator (like Salesforce integration for self-service contract creation). By sharing an idea to help deals close, legal reminds sales that they aren’t just the department of ‘no.’
This practice, according to McKinsey, enables better prioritization with business units and creates trust. Then, the math gets simple; help spurs trust, which drives respect.
Even better, through regular conversation, your stakeholders start to learn what to look for (and what details matter) in a legal process that frustrates them. As you collaborate, your sales, marketing, or HR colleagues will pick up on issues, pass information to their teams, and proactively address some of the problems that slow down a process, like contract turnaround.
Thomson Reuters reminds us that value perception is earned over time. You cannot just point to a chart and say, “look at all the value we’re providing!” Fair or not, stakeholders don’t intuitively understand what legal does. Meetings, connections, ideas, and storytelling come first.
We’ll be back next week with the next reputation-boosting tip for legal teams. If you want all of the tips now, download this guide today!
