Interim General Counsel — Transactions and Governance (Business Services)

One legal voice in the boardroom

Legal advice tends to arrive at a board in fragments. The deal team explains what a transaction needs, the litigators explain where a dispute stands, the company secretary explains what governance requires, and each is right within its own frame. What directors rarely receive is a single judgement on how those pieces bear on each other: whether a settlement weakens a negotiating position, whether a governance commitment limits a deal, whether the risk accepted in one place is being paid for in another. The Interim General Counsel is appointed for 18 months, with executive authority, to supply that judgement and to build a legal function that keeps supplying it.

Answering to the Regional President, the general counsel maps who holds which legal decisions, from signing a term sheet to settling a claim, and which limits stay with local leadership. They define what evidence a legal recommendation must carry before it goes to the board. They can halt a live legal commitment, or let it run with conditions, and they refuse any proposal that moves expense or exposure to a party who has not accepted it. Spending is refused where the case cannot name its users, its dependencies or its downside. The general counsel determines the make-up of the legal leadership and how matters escalate, referees disagreements between the Regional President and operating leaders, and decides how often the board hears about legal progress, slipped matters and calls still awaiting a decision.

The difficult part is prioritisation. A combined legal view is only useful if it is short enough to read and confident enough to act on, which means the general counsel must decide what the board does not need to see as firmly as what it does.

From fragments to one view, across eighteen months

The first ninety days should map legal decision rights across transactions, disputes and governance and agree a single route by which legal matters reach the board. By around month nine every live transaction and dispute should be carried by an accountable owner, with legal exceptions going to the board on a fixed schedule rather than when someone remembers. By month 18 transaction, dispute and governance advice should be reaching the board as one view, under an approved legal leadership structure that does not depend on the interim general counsel to hold it together.

The general counsel sought, and the three meetings

Your career includes organisations with revenue of $610 million or above, at least 2,400 people and operations in three or more countries, and you can tell a local legal difference that a market really needs from one that persists only out of habit. The Regional President will want to hear about the platform pivot, cost transformation and turnaround in your past, each of which tests whether a legal leader can protect the organisation without slowing it to a halt. Governance ethics should sit at level 4; at level 3 come transaction legal work, the handling of disputes and investigations, and managing the board and its stakeholders, which together describe a lawyer equally credible across a negotiating table and a boardroom. You protect controls that earn their place, show the board what each exception is really costing, and leave a stronger legal bench than you found.

Pace matters here. The Regional President meets you privately by video during week one, then again in week two to work a case through with you. By week three you are in front of the board directors, in person, for a discussion. A response follows each meeting within four working days.