The Mini-MBA for In-house Lawyers

This business school style five-day residential programme uses up-to-date MBA thinking and techniques to focus on the real and challenging issues that are confronting today’s in-house legal departments.

Completely revised and updated for 2012 it includes the core elements of a business school MBA focused on the key skills that are essential to leading and managing an in-house legal department.

In this Summer School, the expert trainers from a legal and business background will share with participants their own experiences from working as in-house lawyers and business managers. They will refer to and explore up-to-the-minute management and leadership methodologies and techniques. The Summer School also offers a unique opportunity to share existing best practice and establish industry-wide norms with colleagues from different organisations and countries.

Who should attend?

• Heads of legal departments
• Legal affairs directors and managers
• Senior corporate counsel and advisors
• Legal departments CEOs
• Key corporate law team members
• Private practice lawyers seeking a switch to an in-house role
• Private practice lawyers wishing to learn more about the in-house legal role

What are the objectives of this course

As a result of attending this Summer School, you will be able to:

• Refine and develop the role and strategy of the in-house legal function
• Review and analyse financial management procedures and strategies from the perspective of the in-house legal department
• Define and demonstrate the value of the legal department to the rest of the organisation
• Respond and contribute effectively to cost cutting pressures
• Create and implement strong working relationships with non-legal colleagues to influence behaviour towards legal issues
• Manage and lead the in-house legal team to high performance
• Access and enhance core leadership management techniques in the context of effective change management
• Understand and clarify the different roles and purposes of the legal team
• Develop and maintain a legal risk management strategy
• Learn and exploit how to get the best value from external law firms and gain value for money from their services
• Identify and evaluate alternatives to hourly billing when they are appropriate
• Examine and understand how successful Heads of Legal have applied a commercial and strategic focus to achieve results
• Leverage and utilise knowledge support from all areas of the business to achieve your goals within budget
• Measure and boost the performance of the legal team through valuable assessment and coaching

Unique case study

This exclusive programme is designed to be highly practical and promote an integrated learning approach. A five-part unique case study has been developed specifically for this course to provide a blended learning approach.

Participants will be divided into small working groups. This step-by-step case is integrated to run throughout the course providing the opportunity to put theory into practice and context under the guidance of our expert training faculty. Each step will follow the key learning points at each stage of the programme:

1 Aligning the legal department to meet business needs
2 Getting better buy-in for legal services
3 Cost cutting challenge
4 Changing who does what to enhance delivery
5 Performance management

Through the case study new techniques will be put into perspective allowing the participants to understand how they will benefit their team and organisation.

The Cambridge Legal Summer School series has been developed to provide in-house lawyers and contract executives with a focused learning opportunity that takes them outside of the office environment and allows them to benefit from being away from the daily challenges of their role, mix with colleagues from other organisations and concentrate on developing their commercial, professional, personal and technical skills.

Become part of the Falconbury Legal Summer School Alumni by attending this programme and you will access a new international network of legal colleagues. Meet and network in the exclusive learning environment created annually by our legal summer school series set in the heart of Cambridge.

Find our more about our Social and Networking Programme HERE.

Refreshments and registration

Welcome, introductions and objectives setting with the Programme Director Mark Prebble

Module 1 – Business strategy and strategic planning for the in-house legal department

During the module you will explore and examine the concept of business strategy and strategic choices. You will analyse how strategic planning tools can be applied to link and integrate the legal dimension with the overall business strategy.

Your strategy

• Your business has a strategy – do you know what it is?
• Is it taking you where you need to be Strategy, tactics and choices
• Definition
• Classic strategy development
  • Why do you exist
  • How do you deliver value for others
  • Who are you
  • What performance do you need
  • What is your message
• Top down vs bottom up strategies

Strategies for winning vs strategies for success

• The difference between success and winning and when to focus on each
• Creating strategies for success
• Strategic activity systems

Aligning the legal department to meet business needs

• The need and demands for legal services
• Building the full picture
• Supporting business development and preservation
• Assessing future needs
• Risk appetite and corporate culture
• Resourcing legal services in-house
• In-house capability decisions

Selecting the right options for the provision of legal services

• An overview of the options
• In-house capability decisions
• External providers
• Cost implications
• Developing and selling a blueprint

Module 2 – Effective management of legal risk across the business

This module will examine how in-house legal can successfully position it’s services to the rest of the organisation; and how to apply some of the classic marketing strategies and techniques to raise the profile of in-house legal within the organisation.

Legal risk management

• What does ‘legal risk’ encompass?
• Identifying the key areas of legal risk and who should own them
• Processes for regulatory compliance
• Processes for relationship management with contracting parties and third parties
• Putting business development on a sound footing
• Working together to preserve the business

Getting buy-in for better legal awareness

• The case for legal awareness
• Proactive initiatives worth pursuing
• Matching growing appetite with greater capability to deliver
• Proven techniques

Customer relations and reputation building

• Expectations of the legal team
  • Responsiveness
  • Spectrum of service delivery
• Client care
  • Reporting and review
• Client discipline
  • Coherence without barriers
• Setting expectations
  • Consensus within the team
  • Articulation to the business
  • Reinforcement by business managers
• Acting as ‘internal consultants’

The view from the other side

• Learning from those in-house lawyers who have become business leaders
  • What pointers for us does their hindsight provide?
  • What best prepared them to be candidates for a business role?

Lawyers contribution to decision making

• Positioning recommendations on legal risk
  • Comfort and discomfort zones
  • Cultural and behavioural tensions
• Business acumen for in-house lawyers

Module 3 – Understanding the business from a financial perspective

This module is designed to help you understand the language of business finance and to know what questions to ask your financial colleagues. It will provide you with a clear understanding of the key aspects of financial and commercial management from an operational perspective and show how in-house legal links with the finance function and enable you to gain a deeper understanding of the key financial indicators that are useful within your department.

The history and the accounts

• All of the jargon around rules and the like
• The main statements and what they tell you
• How to interpret the figures to understand the business issues
• Valuing a business from the accounts – EBITDA etc. The future and the need for business processes
• The Boardroom jargon quiz
• Business plans – why are they needed and how are they prepared?
• The use of budgets and management information to control businesses
• Why cash is king and the need for cash flow forecasts
• Investment decisions explained
  • net present values
  • rates of return
  • payback periods

Module 4 – Managing fees with external law firms

Ensuring you are getting best value from your external law partners is essential to delivering an effective working partnership. This module will explore the process from both an in-house and private practice perspective and deliver techniques that will ensure your relationships deliver win-win fee arrangements.

The problems with traditional fee arrangement

• What do law firms want?
• Understanding the cost and the cash flow

Finding ways of operating more creative and “win-win” fee arrangements

• How do you encourage greater efficiency – the use of matter planning and pricing tools?
• Fee negotiation – making it more effective and less stressful
• Genuinely creative fee arrangements that helpeveryone

• Making sure that there are no unforeseen surprises on fees

• Getting the engagement letter right
• Practical ways of managing scope creep

Module 5 – Maximising performance within budgetary and other constraints

With budgets under pressure, you need to foster astute use of the resources, which you can secure. You also need to operate within the parameters of the regimes which your organisation puts in place.

Knowledge management

• Know how transfer from external providers
• Know how sharing within the team
• Investment in quality assurance

Information technology and working environment

• Adoption and successful use
• Proficiency
• Work hygiene issues

Maximising others’ contribution

• Support staff
• Other functions and departments

Module 6 – Leading and managing strategic change

This module will explore the different types of people management styles and their relative effectiveness in the context of strategic change and how these can be applied to help you lead a high performance team. It will also help you identify your own motivational and leadership style and preferences. You will learn how to adjust your style to suit the needs of others in order to increase your influencing capabilities.

Strategy, change and people

• Eight levels of change
• Compelling strategies for everyone to follow

How you experience change

• Change-U
• People types and change
• Leading yourself through change
• Followership through change
• Leading others through change
• Integrating actions, beliefs, cultures and processes to enable change

The change toolkit

• Types of change
• Change readiness assessment
• Stakeholder analysis
• The politics of change
• Communication
• Influence
• Networking
• Success factors

Module 7 – People development

Getting the balance right between encouraging professional autonomy and ensuring transparency and accountability. Stimulating personal development of individuals and insuring you do not lose sight of our own.

Developing the in-house team

• Competency profiles
  • Bridging the competency gap
• Skills development training
  • Core
  • Complementary
• Performance management
  • Objective monitoring
  • Headaches
• Coaching
  • Role models
  • Management pitfalls
• Career perspectives
  • 3 avenues

Developing yourself

• Honest-self-assessment
• Continuous improvement
• Staying up-to-date and engaged
• Dreads and wishes

Close of Summer School

The highly skilled training faculty will draw on their own extensive experience of managing effective in-house legal departments as well as using real-life examples they have encountered in other organisations to illustrate practical learning points.

Summer School director

Mark Prebble during his 21 years as an employed in-house lawyer has worked for ICI and The BOC Group plc in the UK, and Biogen and SGS in Switzerland. He held the positions of General Counsel at SGS and Group Legal Adviser at The BOC Group plc. Since 1998 when he established Lawyers in Business, Mark has worked with in-house legal departments, providing coaching and support for in-house lawyers, wherever located, on management issues, legal department performance and projects involving raising legal awareness. Mark runs workshops for in-house lawyers in Europe and Asia. He also undertakes project management work for businesses, which have no legal department and interim management of legal departments.

Summer School faculty of presenters

Graham Boyd is known for his success in leading people, business, research, strategy and multi-stakeholder dialogue. He integrates hard skills with soft skills, to enable clients to connect the organisation’s purpose and strategy with the behaviours required. Graham started his professional life in high energy physics and computing then moved into Procter & Gamble, where he led the successful development of new products and new organisations. He combined complex systems thinking: seeing the whole, the interactions, and the parts and then changing the system for the better to drastically improve their operations in Asia and then in Europe. At P&G he worked globally with the in-house legal team to develop strategic thinking and management skills. Since leaving P&G in 2008 Graham has been an accomplished trainer and coach and achieved great success with organisations and teams globally in developing their strategic decision-making skills, and empowering them to link their operations to overall business performance.

Robert Mowbray is one of the longest standing and most widely known trainers of professionals having worked in and with law, accounting and other organisations for over 25 years. He is renowned as a trainer in things “financial” and has considerable experience of helping lawyers to read financial statements and in helping professional firms to increase profitability through more efficient and effective working practices. Robert was the author of Maximising the Profitability of Law Firms and has trained or consulted with over 400 firms in over 20 countries. He has been voted Trainer of the Year by the Legal Education & Training Group and is the current author of the annual financial benchmarking survey organised by the Law Management Section of the Law Society. The unique experience that Robert has gained puts him in a position to independently and authoritatively help in-house legal departments understand strategic financial management and how they can build effective relationships with external law partners.

The Moller Centre
Churchill College
Storey’s Way
Cambridge CB3 0DE, UK
Tel: +44 (0)1223 465500

Web: www.mollercentre.co.uk

Residential accommodation

Set in the heart of Cambridge, one of Englands most famous centres of learning the Møller Centre accommodation has a fresh contemporary style and provides comfort and space for relaxing or studying. Some leisure facilities are available on site including a fitness suite, squash and tennis courts. Wireless broadband access is available throughout the centre.

Accommodation is included for the nights of the 19-21 August 2012. Breakfast, lunch and dinner are also included for the duration of your stay. If you would like to extend the length of your stay or bring a spouse there is an extra charge for this.

Please contact Falconbury Customer Services for more information on +44 (0)20 7729 6677 or contact use via our contact form

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This course qualifies for the following CPD programmes:

• Solicitors Regulation Authority: 29.00 hours
• General Council of the Bar: 24.00 hours

• Abu Dhabi Gas Industries Ltd
• Affin Bank Berhad
• APM Terminals International BV
• Applus RTD
• Atos Worldline
• Atos Worldline Processing GmbH
• Banco Espirito Santo SA
• Bank of Albania
• Central Bank of Trinidad & Tobago
• Clico (Trinidad) Ltd
• Co-operative Bank of Kenya Ltd
• Communications & Information Technology Commission
• Deloitte TCF, LLP
• Eli Lilly & Company Ltd
• Ghana Commercial Bank Ltd
• Impact Developer & Contractor
• JSC "Aizkraukles Bank"
• MTN Syria
• NNPC Pension Fund Ltd
• Nordea Bank Finland Plc Latvia branch
• O2 (UK) Ltd
• Oando Plc
• Saint Ann Bauxite Ltd
• Sanlam Capital Markets Ltd
• Sc Pfizer Romania Srl
• Securities & Exchange Commision
• Severstal Joint Stock Company
• Tele2 AB
• Temasek Holdings (Private) Ltd
• TengizChevrOil LLP

“‘Useful content and good presentation from Mark’”

Jorgen Schou, Chief Legal Advisor, University of Southern Denmark

“‘Mark is a very measured, interesting and an authoritative presenter’”

John Tayler, Head of Legal, TD Direct Investing