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06 June 2025 / Kerry Phillip
Issue: 8119 / Categories: Features , Legal services , Career focus , Profession
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A GC’s guide to team optimisation: don’t wait, do it today, by Kerry Phillip
  • GCs and CLOs must evolve beyond traditional legal roles to lead tech-enabled, high-performance teams that deliver measurable business value.
  • Successful team transformation starts with data-driven discovery, strategic planning, and phased implementation, focusing on early wins and continuous improvement.
  • Tech adoption and clear service models help legal teams automate routine tasks, enabling them to focus on high-value, strategic work that drives businesses forward.

General Counsel (GCs) and Chief Legal Officers (CLOs) are almost without exception excellent at the ‘law’ and ‘managing risk’ parts of the role description—it’s why they got the job in the first place. But today, GCs must also run an efficient, tech-enabled, productive team that delivers, and can show it is delivering, value to the business. And for this, they have had no training.

I have always been interested in change, innovation and finding ways to accelerate, more so than in, say, the niceties of competition law or the technicalities of privacy.

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MOVERS & SHAKERS

DWF—19 appointments

DWF—19 appointments

Belfast team bolstered by three senior hires and 16 further appointments

Cadwalader—Andro Atlaga

Cadwalader—Andro Atlaga

Firm strengthens leveraged finance team with London partner hire

Knights—Ella Dodgson & Rebecca Laffan

Knights—Ella Dodgson & Rebecca Laffan

Double hire marks launch of family team in Leeds

NEWS
The Supreme Court issued a landmark judgment in July that overturned the convictions of Tom Hayes and Carlo Palombo, once poster boys of the Libor and Euribor scandal. In NLJ this week, Neil Swift of Peters & Peters considers what the ruling means for financial law enforcement
Bea Rossetto of the National Pro Bono Centre makes the case for ‘General Practice Pro Bono’—using core legal skills to deliver life-changing support, without the need for niche expertise—in this week's NLJ
In this week's NLJ, Steven Ball of Red Lion Chambers unpacks how advances in forensic science finally unmasked Ryland Headley, jailed in 2025 for the 1967 rape and murder of 75-year-old Louisa Dunne. Preserved swabs and palm prints lay dormant for decades until DNA-17 profiling produced a billion-to-one match
Small law firms want to embrace technology but feel lost in a maze of jargon, costs and compliance fears, writes Aisling O’Connell of the Solicitors Regulation Authority in this week's NLJ
Charlie Mercer and Astrid Gillam of Stewarts crunch the numbers on civil fraud claims in the English courts, in this week's NLJ. New data shows civil fraud claims rising steadily since 2014, with the King’s Bench Division overtaking the Commercial Court as the forum of choice for lower-value disputes
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