The 3-day Mini MBA for In-house Lawyers Training Course

Overview

Leadership and management skills are a completely different ball game from the technical role of practicing law, but in-house lawyers must have these skills to succeed in a business setting.

By enhancing your management skills and your understanding of the main challenges facing business leaders today, you will understand how you can better support and advise your business from a legal viewpoint.

This course will enable you to discover key frameworks, tools, techniques and concepts to enhance your business knowledge and excel in your role as a valuable in-house lawyer. Overall it will enable you to become a more rounded business professional.

The expert trainers will share their own experiences from working in law and as business managers. By attending this intensive course, you will benefit from their considerable expertise and have time to explore new skills and ways of working to ensure you succeed in a demanding role.

Are you ready to build your skill-set as a lawyer by increasing your business knowledge?

Benefits of attending

• Enhance core management and leadership techniques
• Understand how to enable effective change management
• Learn key business strategy concepts and frameworks
• Achieve better outcomes by applying project management techniques
• Understand the challenges facing businesses today and how the legal dept can provide support
• Establish a motivated and engaged legal team
• Get to grips with corporate culture and use it to your advantage
• Develop your finance and accounting principles knowledge
• Enhance your budgeting skills
• Identify creative options for fee arrangements

Who should attend?

• Heads of legal departments
• Legal directors and managers
• Senior corporate counsel and advisers
• Key corporate law team members
• Private practice lawyers seeking to switch to an in-house role

Introduction

Module 1: Business strategy and strategic planning

Business strategy

• Key business strategy concepts and frameworks
  • Includes understanding its purpose, value, and alignment with departmental strategies
  • Includes Blue Ocean/Kim & Mauborgne; Porter/USPs, Grant, Johnson & Scholes
• The strategic process – investigate, create, implement, embed
• Challenges facing businesses today
• Understanding customer value, including customers inside your organisation

Operational effectiveness and efficiency

• Introductions to
  • Process management
  • Quality management
  • Knowledge management
  • Risk appetite and corporate culture
• Using these strategies to:
  • streamline your legal services inside your organisation, and
  • understanding tensions between profitability, efficiency and risk inside your organisation

Developing a strategy for legal services

• Understanding the needs and demands for legal services
• Aligning legal services goals with the goals of the business
• Delivering value for the business
• In-house capability decisions
• When to engage with external providers

Module 2: Leading and managing strategic change

People management and leadership skills

• Team-building, collaboration, culture and trust
  • Understanding and leading global and virtual teams; building trust; encouraging collaborative behaviours; understanding cognitive biases; psychological safety
• Building motivation and engagement
  • Intrinsic and extrinsic motivations; trust; autonomy, mastery and purpose
• Leadership and influencing skills
  • Leadership styles; leading versus managing; becoming comfortable with leading; influencing in 360°

Leading strategic change

• Managing change
  • Including Kotter, Lewin and ADKAR models
  • Overcoming common problems
• Successful strategy implementation and the importance of communication, transparency, coaching and influencing skills

Module 3: Project management and teamwork

Introduction to project management and working with stakeholders

• Essential skills of project management
  • An introduction to waterfall project management and agile projects
• How to plan, execute, control and manage a project to achieve set goals
• Managing risks and monitoring progress
• Avoiding pitfalls and staying on target
• Working with and getting buy-in from stakeholders

Module 4: Finance for business

Accounting principles

• A general overview of accounting principles and how they should be applied (with examples)
• Identify specifics within UK-GAAP / IFRS where applicable in general accounts

Understanding the statement of cashflow, profit and loss and the balance sheet

• Case study using an anonymous set of accounts
• The key factors and what they mean
• Identify how different statements within a set of accounts are related to one another

Identifying accounting scenarios that illustrate good performance – profitability and solvency

• Examples of key performance indicators that demonstrate performance levels
• Discuss what KPI’s mean
• The ranges of KPI’s in terms of output that determine good performance or otherwise
• Practical: consider KPI’s that relate to your business

Identifying accounting scenarios that might raise legal concerns

• Focus on insolvent accounts
• Work-In-Progress (WIP) measurement
• Overdrawn Directors Loan Accounts (DLA)
• VAT and the principle of timing with invoicing

Module 5: Managing finance and the legal department

Managing a budget for the legal department and external expenditure

• The importance of an 80/20 approach to analysis
• Owning a budget
• Involvement in constructing a budget and understanding the mechanisms in that construction
• Identifying and understanding variance from the norm

Managing fees with external law firms

• Understanding margin from the departments cost base and pricing accordingly
• Communicating with client on costs
• Tracking costs
• Recording time
• Money-on-Account
• Credit control

Traditional fee arrangements and more creative options

• Hourly rates vs fixed fees.
• Ensuring fixed fees create margin.
• Retainers and MOA

Work-In-Progress – the great unknown

• Understanding and measuring WIP
• Managing WIP
• WIP as part of fee-earner performance