Building legal leadership across borders

A little while ago a General Counsel asked us to run five searches at once.

Not one after another, but all at the same time: Legal Directors to lead in Africa, Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, alongside specialist leaders in employment, governance, risk and compliance.

To be mandated with almost an entire legal leadership build doesn’t happen often, and it was truly a privilege to have been granted the opportunity.

Building a team is one of the most engaging scenarios in search – a single leader is a complex task – team construction throws emphasis on the interplay that will appear between them. These leaders would report to the same hiring

manager but also need to work closely with one another.

Every candidate we met for one role we were also weighing against the others, and against the team we were trying to build, matching each to the organisation’s cultural framework, alongside the right level of cultural nuance to suit the specifics of the regions they were to oversee.

The markets’ respective traits made that harder, but also more interesting. Each had its own essence, in how seniority reads, who the genuinely credible people were, and what it took to move someone who wasn’t actively looking. The more hierarchical leadership style in Africa, the prevalence of talent from larger companies in a less sophisticated scale-up scene in Poland – each region presented its own challenges both for sourcing and screening.

This in turn sharpened what we were vetting for. This GC wasn’t after lawyers to sit on the edge of a decision and flag the risks. They wanted commercial leaders, people who would own an outcome and get out in front of the business rather than hold it back. So that’s what we tested for, in every conversation: the confidence to find a sensible route through complexity and to sit at the table as a peer. This standard couldn’t be applied selectively; it had to span across all markets or risk organisational cohesion and effectiveness – balancing entirely contrasting talent cohorts under one standard is the pinnacle of search – it was a lesson in rigour and re-enforced our own standards accordingly.

Distinctions between jurisdictions will always present legal complexities – but the mark of a successful in-house lawyer is increasingly unbound by these constraints. When the comparison between legal systems – for advisory purposes – can be so rapidly queried using the right LLM, the emphasis on leadership skills, problem solving and commerciality only continues to increase. Localised expertise is now as much about navigating market relationships and the operational legal landscape, judicial structures and authorities as it is about jurisdictional legal knowledge itself. The expectations applied to in-house lawyers will only continue to grow as a result; it is quite fascinating to see the speed at which the function is developing!

This was the second time in my career I have built out a leadership team either concurrently or in quick succession – the opportunities for learning for our team were immense and rewarding. With gratitude to the client that entrusted us – we were truly delighted to support and with the placements we achieved together.

Running a set of projects like this isn’t generalist work, it rewards people who genuinely know the function and the people in it. Leveraging our legal specialism here made all the difference - being trusted to carry all five searches at once is perhaps the clearest sign of what a specialist can achieve that five separate hands never could.

If you’re building or strengthening legal leadership across markets, that’s a conversation we most enjoy. If that would be useful, we’d be glad to talk.