Discussions around career choices for partners and general counsel will, with depressing regularity, turn to two things: why private practice lawyers find it impossible to get non-exec roles, and why general counsel aren’t on the board. The subsidiary question, particularly for some in-house lawyers, is how to get more involved in the mainstream business and leave the legal department behind.
Everyone mulling over these issues should study Rupert Pearce’s story closely. It’s the second in our series of View from the Board, in which we speak to chief executives or chairpersons about their thoughts on lawyers. Pearce, though, is not your run-of-the-mill CEO. He was a partner at Linklaters, where he pioneered equity-for-fees at the height of the 1999 dotcom boom. Then he left to become COO for Atlas Ventures and after five years moved to become GC and then CEO of Inmarsat. It’s a highly unusual – and enviable – career trajectory. But his initial move out of the magic circle was not born of some grand plan, but because he was sick of not seeing his young children.
In the course of my job I meet many partners who love what they do, but also plenty who are just hanging on till retirement, usually citing the threadbare excuse of school fees. And even then, they don’t have much of a plan in terms of what to do afterwards. It’s a depressing form of learned impotence.
What Pearce’s experience shows is that you have to work out what you really value. Then, he advises, work out what excites you. Just as businesses are now exhorted to disrupt themselves and to innovate, so should individuals – which means taking yourself out of the comfort zone.
This can manifest itself in a number of ways. Take the call from the headhunter. Find a mentor. Stop thinking about status. Learn new things. Get clued up on financial modelling. If you’re in-house, take on company-wide projects so you can start to direct traffic and whet your appetite for other initiatives in the business.
Not everyone can end up being chief executive of a FTSE company, but Pearce’s example shows what can happen when you sort out your priorities. And yes, he did get to see his children grow up.
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