The Evolving Relationships of In-House Counsel and Law Firms with Leander Dolphin, Managing Partner of Shipman & Goodwin

In this episode of On Record PR, Jennifer Simpson Carr goes on record with Leander Dolphin, Managing Partner of Shipman & Goodwin, to discuss the importance of utilizing a business mindset to adopt a client-first approach. Leander leads the strategic direction of the firm, which is comprised of more than 140 lawyers in Connecticut and New York. In her practice, Leander has dedicated her career to advising educational institutions and organizations that foster the development of children, youth, and young adults, including having served as the Vice President of Human Resources and General Counsel for the Girl Scouts of Connecticut.

Jennifer Simpson Carr: The last time that we were together was during Marketing Partner Forum in beautiful Amelia Island. You participated in a fantastic plenary session that focused on the relationship perspectives of general counsel and their outside legal partners, private practice attorneys. It had a wonderful mix of law firm private practice attorneys and general counsel, so I’d love it if you could give our listeners a quick summary of the overarching theme for that session.

Leander Dolphin: Sure. It’s unbelievable, but it’s been several months since then. The overarching theme was a discussion about how the relationship between in-house counsel and private law firms has changed over the years. What has been good? What are the challenges, and where do we think the relationship will continue to go? Where will it evolve over time? We also talked about AI and how that might impact the practice of law in general. It was really good to have different perspectives from other law firm management partners as well as a number of general counsel.

Jennifer Simpson Carr: It was a really well-received session. I know that I as well as the entire group around me were taking diligent notes.

Can you talk about the shift you have seen in the perspective of in-house counsel over the past 20-25 years?

This is my 20th year of practice, so I feel like I’m right in the middle of this generational shift. When I first started practicing, the approach was that in-house counsel was sort of a way station that you would go to after you try the law firm for a little bit. It was billed as a place where you could have a good quality of life as an alternative to private law practice. There did not appear to be, at least from a junior lawyer perspective, lots of room for growth. There were very few opportunities to become a leader and even to become general counsel.

I have seen a big shift over the years in that in-house counsel are truly subject matter experts. They have to be in their particular industry and their businesses. I don’t want to suggest that it wasn’t professional before, but it’s more of a professionalized role as counsel. When I talk to in-house counsel now, whether those are my clients or peers and friends who are working in-house, in leadership up through the general counsel role, they talk about their business as executives and they provide legal advice as executives.

I think that has been a shift, and because there’s been this shift, the businesses are treating their in-house counsel as a business-related role, and they are paying them as such. I don’t think those roles are the typical quality-of-life roles that we were thinking of 20 years ago. A lot of my colleagues and friends in-house are working just as hard and as long as they were in private firms. I have seen a shift there, and I feel like the stakes seem higher for in-house counsel now than they did before.

Jennifer Simpson Carr: It’s a positive shift that you’ve described, and I heard from the panel that they view one another as true business partners.

Leander Dolphin: No matter where you sit as a lawyer, seeing your client as a partner is the best way to become a trusted advisor, and that requires understanding the business, the levers, the pressures, and all the different things that are leading to the legal question. That has forced the lawyers to think differently about the way we provide legal advice. It’s less about, “I did a memo, I did some research, and here are the possibilities.” This is, “Of course we’ve done the research, of course we understand the context for the question, and here are the business options that you have based on the state of the law and where we can go with it.” I do think that’s been a shift that I’ve seen.

As a leader of Shipman & Goodwin, how do you train your lawyers to take a client-first approach?

I tell them directly that we are only in business because of our clients and for the service of our clients and in service for our clients. A lot of people come into private practice starting out as a junior lawyer,  and they’re not sure what they want to do. They’re looking for purpose. They’re looking for a way to get fulfillment, and I don’t know that private practice is usually the place where people are thinking that they can get that sense of personal fulfillment and a service-driven life.

I have found that the lawyers who are the most successful are the ones who approach it with a service-forward client-centric approach, because if everything you’re doing is about how to help the client, how to serve the client, it does give you more of a purpose. It’s not just counting widgets or billing hours. You’re doing whatever it is that you need to do to help your client achieve their goals.

We talk about it in those terms with our junior lawyers and up through our partners when we talk about succession planning. We talk about what the client needs and what the client will need from our team of lawyers or the people who are coming behind us. If you start there, you usually get closer to the answer. It requires not only understanding your client’s business, but asking the right questions and listening a lot instead of having a “me” approach, “I know everything, I know everything about the law, I know the answer.” If you start from what the client needs are, you get to a better result for your client. That leads to successful relationships.

When we do pitches, for example, responding to an RFP or going out to make a pitch for new work, we make sure that we have diverse teams of people, including more junior lawyers, so that they can see what it means to be in that moment where the client is looking at us as a service provider and what types of questions they’re asking. What are they looking for from us? That helped me shape how I think about what my job was when I went to a number of those pitches when I was a junior lawyer.

I remember I went to one early on in my career, and one of my partners, who is like the elder and the person who started our School Law practice at Shipman, said to the client in a response to a question, “One of the things that distinguishes us is that we are going to be available to you whenever you call. We want to be there to be available to you, so that means it’s 24/7.” I remember blanching a little bit. I was like, “Oh my God, are we supposed to be available 24/7? Is that what I signed up for?”

What I saw in that approach was having the client see that we were in the trenches with them. If the news is going to show up at the school or the college, they can call us. If that’s happening at 11:00 at night, they can call us at 11:00 at night, or if that is happening on a Saturday, they can do that. That taught me something crucial about how you get a client to trust you.

Obviously, that affects the way we work as well. Certainly, clients think of emergencies differently than others might. Something that they think is an emergency that warrants an 11:00 PM email or call isn’t necessarily something that we all would think is an emergency. The important part is that they know that we are going to be looking to help them when they think they’re in an emergency so that we can help them throughout it.

Jennifer Simpson Carr: You bring up a great perspective, which is that it’s easy for us to jump in and try to validate whether or not it’s an emergency. But the perspective of saying, “This feels like an emergency to the client, and I respect that” – I am certain that goes a long way with your clients.

Leander Dolphin: It does. Sometimes if I’m on vacation and I get a call from a client, I ask, “Can you tell me what’s going on, and do you feel like this is an emergency?” because that gives the client the agency to decide, “I’m calling because I want to talk to you and I need your help.” If it’s an emergency, I need to talk to you now, which means I’m going to leave wherever I am and get you what you need. If it isn’t an emergency and it’s something that is still necessary, we can spend time talking. I can adjust my approach. I will respond differently in a crisis than I will in something that is pressing but not as urgent as “There’s a child who’s been involved in a school shooting,” for example, or something that’s really an emergency.

What was your expectation and what led to great relationships with your outside counsel when you sat in the role of general counsel?

First of all, I was terrified all the time as a general counsel, because there is a very steep learning curve. My training before I went in-house was as an employment lawyer and a litigator. I had certainly given advice to lots of clients about things like a layoff or termination or reduction in force. I was very comfortable giving that advice. Being inside the organization and actually executing on that was very different and gave me a clear perspective about the difference between giving advice and implementing the advice that your lawyers have given you. That was eye-opening to me.

Learning more about business in general – how to be an executive, the kinds of things that the CEO is thinking about as she is making decisions – that was really helpful to me. I remember one of the things that came up was that the Girl Scouts have a lot of property. It’s thousands and thousands of acres. Of course, that meant some people, especially the utilities, would be interested in using the land for things like a cell phone tower. I was an employment lawyer, so I did not know anything at all about cell phone tower leases. I needed to get up to speed. I needed to reach out to a trusted advisor who could do that. I needed to learn enough, so I could be helpful in communicating to our lawyer what we needed and what my CEO had asked for and to get advice.

What I was looking for was someone who was going to explain it to me pretty quickly without a lot of jargon. I’m an employment lawyer, but I need to understand cell phone tower releases very quickly – what we should be concerned about and what the pitfalls are. Then I need to turn it around and tell my CEO, who trusted me to get the answers on that. I remember getting the answers from our counsel and then talking to our CEO, and she pushed back and said, “I would like X, Y, and Z.” I remember taking a big gulp because I thought we couldn’t get what she wanted. I was like, “I don’t know that we can do that.” But that was a good experience for me.

I had an issue that was new to me that was important to my client because that’s the organization and the CEO. The CEO doesn’t really care about the law. She wants to make sure that it gets done, and she wants the best deal. Then I needed to talk to the lawyer, who needed to understand that I didn’t have an unlimited budget, because I had a very small legal outside counsel budget. I needed him to explain it very quickly and easily. Then I needed to understand how to apply it in the business context to meet my CEO’s goals.

I felt that what was helpful there was having a lawyer on the outside who could get me up to speed as quickly as possible. I remember I called him back and said, “My CEO wants to do X, Y, and Z.” He said, “Well, that’s going to be tough, but I’ll see what I can do.” That was also a good lesson for me – acknowledging that sometimes the client is asking for something that you wouldn’t expect and that it’s still your job to try to get the best result. He did that.

I learned a lot about being the client and being the general counsel to the client and being a business. It’s a very small example, but it gave me a lot of insight so that when I went back to Shipman, I was a better lawyer because of that experience.

Jennifer Simpson Carr: That’s a fantastic story and is certainly demonstrative of all of the components that general counsel face every day. I also appreciated you saying that you were nervous or scared in that role because we oftentimes look at GCs and think they all have it figured out. But at the end of the day, we’re all human, and we have the background and experiences we have.

Leander Dolphin: I did learn a lot from being general counsel. It’s called general counsel, but it’s a little bit of a misnomer. You think that because someone is general counsel, the person knows a lot about a lot, when the answer is it’s impossible to be a master of all. Knowing what your strengths are and being able to identify when you need help from someone who’s an outside expert on a particular area of the law – that’s important.

I do think the general counsel have to be experts in their business, which is different than being a private practice lawyer who are experts in their particular subject matter area. It’s a different shift. Obviously if you’re general counsel, you’re a smart person who can think about a lot and carry a lot, but there’s a lot of not knowing.

The thing I learned in-house was that sometimes a good enough answer was good for the business – not necessarily the one that was going to be the perfect legal solution or the only way it can get done. I learned that sometimes the business judgment, which is always the client’s call, is less perfect than the legal answer might be.

What do you anticipate will be the evolving relationship between GCs and in-house counsel, and their outside counsel in the years to come?

I think that the relationships will continue to evolve to become more of a business role, as opposed to just calling someone for a legal answer. We get a lot of requests for secondments, for example. That is something that businesses need; they’re looking for lawyers who can essentially serve as their in-house lawyers. They don’t need to go and do an entire search. They’re not necessarily looking for a long-term solution. They’re looking for someone who can be helpful in closing a gap inside their business, and having a lawyer with that skillset is very important.

I think we’re going to see a lot more of that, and that means that lawyers are going to have to be better businesspeople. The advent of AI will change the relationship in terms of the expectations of what general counsel expect from their lawyers and what they’re willing to pay for. We’ve already seen that shifting quite a bit with the outside counsel guidelines and how they manage or micro-manage that because it’s a cost issue.

I do think that we’ll continue to see more of a shift there in terms of how you’re adding value and what the clients are willing to pay for in terms of what’s legal advice and what is commodity advice, or commodity legal work that they can do internally. They’re going to come to us for more specialized, complicated issues than the low-hanging fruit on things.

There are a lot of general counsel and chief legal officers running their own law firms internally. I think that they will need us for things that their in-house lawyers either don’t have the bandwidth to do or don’t have the experience to do and don’t have enough time to get up to speed on a particular new area. Someone on the outside law firm who does it for multiple clients can bring it to bear. I don’t know if that’s a complete shift, but I think it’s a transition into a more specialized use of lawyers outside.

I’m imagining our listeners, and many of them are practicing attorneys. You are a leader in our industry and have been named Woman of the Year, Women to Watch, and Attorney of the Year, just in the past few years. They’re hearing you today and they’re listening and thinking, “How can I make decisions in my career to be positioned in a way where I can also be a leader one day in my firm or my practice group?” What advice would you give them?

Say yes to certain opportunities that may seem like something you hadn’t been thinking about in the past. I can honestly say I have not been thinking of myself as a leader of any law firm, and when we were talking about who was going to lead the firm, I was not sure that it would be someone like me. I’m an education and employment lawyer. I have varied experience, and I have been able to bring a lot to bear to the role, but I hadn’t considered it as something that was among the options that I could do.

My advice would be to be open and say yes even to those stretch opportunities, because going in-house was a stretch opportunity for me too. As I said, I was terrified. I was still a relatively junior lawyer when I got that role and it allowed me to learn so much and to become a better lawyer. It positioned me for doing the work that I’m doing now because there aren’t as many private practice lawyers who have been both the client and general counsel, as well as an associate and partner at a private firm. I’ve been able to bring that perspective to my role, and I hadn’t considered it as something that was possible.

So say yes. Say no to things that do not serve you. What I mean by that is be really clear and know what’s important to you and what your values are, and don’t get distracted by what people think you should be doing at a particular time or that there’s a time frame for you to be doing specific things. Keep the focus on what is serving you and your family at a particular time. The rest will come.

Leander Dolphin

Learn more about Shipman & Goodwin

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leander-a-dolphin-5b0678/

Jennifer Simpson Carr

Website: https://www.furiarubel.com/our-team/members/jennifer-simpson-carr/

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jennifersimpsoncarr

Instagram: @jsimpsoncarr