In-House Legal Tip: Plan your in-house legal career

Ask yourself this – how much time did you spend planning your last holiday? Was it an hour or two? Maybe more? 

Makes sense right – if you only get a few weeks off then you want to make sure you use it wisely yeah?

Another question: how much time did you spend last year planning out your career? 

Here is what we know. Less than 10% of in-house lawyers have formulated a career plan that has been reduced to writing and which they actively implement.

Wow! I will say it again – “wow”.

Your career should, all going well span 4-5 decades and, if you are in the 90%, you spend more time planning a week-long holiday, than you do on your career plan!

Such behavior will not serve you well. So, a few concepts/reminders for you to think about:

1. No Plan: you tend to end up where you are headed
2. Golden Goose: your job pays for the holidays (and a lot of other things)
3. Life Sentence: your working career exceeds a prisoner’s “life sentence” in most cases
4. Drudgery Factor: work, if not carefully managed, can be quite unpleasant
5. You’re the Business: you are your own business as an in-house lawyer – and all good businesses come with strong management

So, if you want to rapidly differentiate your career trajectory – commit to formulating a career plan – and you must spend no less time on it than you spent planning your last holiday.

If you operate in the Pantheon – and planning holidays is not what you do – then you must spend no less time working on your career plan than you spent on your last 18 holes of golf, or perhaps your last dinner at Nobu. 

Over the next few weeks, we will give you the GLS Top 10 factors to bear in mind when formulating your career plan. 

READY TO TRANSFORM YOUR LEGAL TEAM?

Please check out the GLS solutions and know-how resources listed on the right side of this page – they might assist your legal team with the issues explored in this Blog. 

Of course, if you would like discuss your transformation needs – please book a 30 minute FREE CONSULT WITH GLS 

In the interim, here are 7 resources and tools that may assist you as you transform the performance capabilities of your legal team:

1. GLS's Ultimate Guide to Legal Operations: download this HERE, and read it thoroughly and regularly. It is a wonderful transformation companion

2. GLS Transformation Boot Camp: for our free and hugely successful, 10 week long, email-based boot camp on how to effectively transform your legal team you can SIGN UP HERE

3. GLS Knowledge Centre: click HERE to access lots of informative and instructive white papers, blogs and training resources etc. - all focused on helping to improve your legal team's performance

4. GLS Legal Operations Community: join the GLS Legal Operations Community and collaborate with other in-house leaders as they seek to tackle many of the same performance issues that you face, click here to JOIN NOW

5. Visit GLS Connect: visit the GLS CONNECT PAGE and select the information you would like to receive from the GLS Legal Operations Community

6. GLS Legal Team Transformation Plans: mitigate the risks of transformation failure by taking a GLS TRANSFORMATION SUPPORT PLAN 

7. Register: GLS Legal Operations Centre: REGISTER HERE to access the GLS Legal Operations Centre for free and to receive more than US$20,000 worth of legal team performance resources

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