Susan Gruesser of Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory U.S. opened an expert panel discussion today on the role of corporate counsel as strategic advisor at the Chief Legal Officer Leadership Forum in New York City. The forum brought together leading senior legal executives for a full day of original programming focused on emerging business challenges in 2017.
Gruesser opened the discussion entitled “The New GC: Adding Value as a Strategic Advisor” by presenting the results of a recently conducted proprietary Wolters Kluwer survey designed to identify the most pressing priorities of corporate counsel in a rapidly evolving marketplace. Amongst other notable findings, the survey results indicate that:
- Corporate counsel professionals want to do more with less. With productivity posing an unprecedented challenge for legal departments, corporate counsel professionals want to add value to wider enterprise-level concerns such as managing commercial risk, mitigating commercial loss, and making organizations more commercially-minded across the board.
- Legal departments need to be proactive and not reactive. Legal departments are seeking to identify potential risks and address them before they become realities.
- Legal departments want to be strategic partners in the business enterprise – not just the gatekeepers. It is critical for legal departments to provide tangible benefits for the business as a whole, not only the legal department itself.
- Technology should work for the legal department, not the other way around. Systems should be simple and improve efficiency, enabling the business as a whole to increase productivity.
“The Wolters Kluwer survey demonstrates that many corporate counsel professionals share a common goal of acting as a strategic advisor for their businesses. Our findings also indicate that corporate counsel are likely to experience challenges in 2017 due to an uncertain regulatory environment and continual technological disruption,” said Gruesser. “To meet these challenges, Wolters Kluwer finds that corporate counsel professionals are increasingly turning to technology for workflow and information solutions that can help them be more productive and effective.”
Wolters Kluwer provides comprehensive workflow solutions for corporate counsel including General Counsel NAVIGATOR, which allows professionals to pinpoint practical answer and guidance across a wide range of topics within a single platform; and RBsourceFilings, a comprehensive SEC research and workflow tool that intelligently integrates key content to boost productivity and ensure better legal practice.
