The General Counsel resume,
risk carried, money moved.
A General Counsel writes the most careful document in the company and the least informative. The page lists practice areas, as though the reader were selecting a specialism. A board is selecting somebody to sit beside it when something has gone wrong, and it reads for what has already gone wrong on your watch and what that cost.
The company's exposure, not your expertise
This title means three different jobs. In a regulated business it is the regulator: inspections, findings, licences and the person who signs. In a company being bought, sold or assembled by acquisition it is transactions, and the warranties you agreed to live with afterwards. In a high-volume commercial business it is contracts at scale, and the cycle time and risk position of a template estate. A page that reads as all three reads as none.
The second read is authority. Whether you were company secretary as well as counsel, whether you sat on the executive committee, whether you reported to the chief executive or through finance, and whether you had a line to the chair or the audit committee that did not pass through management. Legal advice is priced by who is obliged to take it.
The company you protected: revenue, jurisdictions, regulators, listing status, and whether it was sponsor-owned, listed or promoter-held.
Team and structure: qualified lawyers, paralegals, contract managers, compliance staff, and which of them were yours rather than shared with another function.
Whether you held the company secretary role, and which committees you attended by right rather than by invitation.
The three or four matters that defined the tenure, named by type and quantum, because the tenure will be discussed through them whether or not the page mentions them.
Matters, money and time
Legal produces less quantified evidence than any other senior function and is among the best placed to produce it. Matters carry values. Regulators write findings with dates on them. Contracts have cycle times and external firms send invoices. Six figures convert a page of practice areas into a record.
Litigation exposure carried, in currency, with the outcome set against the amount claimed. A $40M claim settled at $3.5M is the entire argument; “successfully defended” is none of it.
Regulatory findings inherited and closed, with dates and the framework behind them, because closing a predecessor's finding is the clearest control evidence a lawyer can offer.
Deal support as a count and a value, with your role stated: sole counsel, instructing a panel, or supporting a corporate development team. Twelve transactions at $18M average is a capability; a list of deal names is a scrapbook.
Contract cycle time and annual volume at both ends, with the templates and delegation matrix that moved it. This is the only legal number the sales organisation ever notices.
External legal spend against a baseline, with the panel structure behind it, because a fall achieved by insourcing work differs entirely from one achieved by declining to run matters.
Compliance programme results rather than its existence: training completion, cases raised per thousand employees, substantiation rate, and how many outcomes survived appeal.
Three lines that describe a lawyer, not a counsel
The sentences below appear on almost every General Counsel page. Each is accurate. Each describes the work rather than the exposure it removed or the transaction it made possible.
“Advised the board and senior management on legal and regulatory matters.” That is the job title in sentence form. Name one decision the board took differently after your advice, and what the alternative would have cost.
“Managed a portfolio of complex litigation and disputes.” Complexity is not an outcome. Give live matter count, aggregate claimed, aggregate settled or awarded, and the provision released.
“Expertise across corporate, commercial, employment, IP and data protection.” That is a directory entry. A board is not buying coverage; it is buying judgement in the two areas where this particular company can be hurt.
Three lines, rewritten.
The same fact, made checkable. Every figure is illustrative of the shape an evidenced line takes — nothing here is invented on your behalf.
The claim on the left is not wrong. It is simply unreadable as evidence: nothing in it can be checked, compared or priced. The version on the right makes the same statement in a form a search partner can act on.
Successfully managed and resolved significant litigation on behalf of the company.
Carried 14 live matters with $52M claimed. Settled the two largest at $6.1M against $34M claimed, took one to judgment and won, and released $9M of provision over three years. Costs on the portfolio ran at 11% of amounts in dispute, down from 19%.
Oversaw contract management and improved efficiency in the legal function.
Rebuilt 60 templates into nine with a two-tier delegation matrix, moving 71% of contracts to business signature without legal review. Median turnaround fell from 19 days to 4 across 3,400 contracts a year, and the two clauses causing 60% of negotiations — liability cap and indemnity scope — were pre-approved to a stated limit.
Supported the company's M&A activity and managed external counsel relationships.
Ran legal on nine acquisitions totalling $340M over four years as sole in-house counsel, instructing three firms on a panel with fixed diligence fees. External spend fell from $4.2M to $2.6M a year while deal volume doubled. Two warranty claims were made against escrow, both recovered in full.