In-House Legal Tip: Reduce White Noise

Having audited the working days of hundreds of in-house legal teams, GLS is of the view that most in-house legal team members only manage to achieve around 3.5-4.5 actually productive hours per day.

To put it in another way – based on the 40-hour working week, in-house lawyers are only productive b/w 50% - 64% of their contracted working hours.

This insight is based on a definition of “productive” as being “time spent dedicated to the delivery of legal dept. services, including working on the apparatus that directly supports service delivery.”

So, what is corporate white noise? Well, anything that takes you away from the substance of your job as an in-house lawyer – which is providing advice, managing risk, and enabling the business to occur safely and efficiently. 

Examples include prolonged socializing (including checking social media), long lunch breaks, holiday event related lunches, farewells, personal telephone calls, unstructured meetings, unnecessary meetings, multi-tasking, poor communications, fixing errant IT, searching for mis-filed documents, sick days, document editing, office politics, frequent coffee breaks, internal conflicts, unnecessary admin, unnecessary HR processes, internal company forums, dubious external training. 

The HR / Happiness Directors out there will no doubt raise eyebrows reading these observations – and will passionately make the case that most of the above activities help to create “cohesive and harmonious workplaces”. 

Obviously, some of the above activities, if carefully curated, can help you in your role as in-house counsel. However, all too often, these activities are not carefully curated and the result is like salt in your diet – a little is essential, but a lot is harmful! 

Lawyers are far too expensive of a resource to spend 40-50% of their time playing “happiness”

Finally, a small insight from research done by a Magic Circle Firm that commissioned a leading Business School to ascertain what motivated its associates. The findings were not the “fluffy feel-good in the workplace stuff” but rather it was simply a large diet of high-quality work and the occasional pat on the back reinforced with sensible pay. That research was money well spent by that particular firm!

So the tip here for in-house leaders is to start shielding your in-house legal team from the corporate white noise – and then watch productivity (and morale) start to improve. 

The tip here for in-house lawyers is to avoid indulging in corporate white noise, Track your time, be accountable, and be distracted for as few minutes as you can each day. Then watch how quickly you start to demonstrably outperform your peers! 

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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. 

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