We often hear the following when we ask the executives of companies whether corporate lawyers should better understand or be sensitive to management components such as business administration, strategic objectives, and competitive barriers:

Our lawyers are trying to meet our needs, but it is more useful to have an attitude of nasıl how can we help you ”. They should be much faster in doing things. We don't have a set standard when a job needs to be done. It would be perfect if our law department came out and gave us a presentation on how our workflows and how they can work more effectively. No one from the law department visited us. We expect the law department to better understand our work. How they can help, how to better integrate, and how to give us faster opinions when necessary. The law department does not seem to understand our business and mutual business relations very well. They are afraid of the legal department's approach when some of our key suppliers are expected to enter into a contractual relationship with us. There is information about why we can't do a lot of things, but we hear little about how we can do it or do it. Our legal department should conduct more efficiency analysis in repetitive jobs and then demonstrate how it can improve productivity. In a study, the importance of each legal function in terms of organization, and then asked the effectiveness of the law department to perform these functions were observed that there is a mismatch between the perceptions of lawyers who think they are done well.

Although considered important, the following functions were rated low by managers on the legal department's activity scale.

-Compliance with recent dates

Solution-oriented

-To have information about business strategy

-To have information about business operations

-Focus on high-value jobs

Preventive / proactive feedback

Be open to feedback

-Risk tolerance

Whether or not the law departments like it, their performance is measured by their customers (other departments within the company that request their services; internal customers). If they adopt a passive approach, it is entirely the customers who determine what to measure. Alternatively, legal departments can assist in creating and shaping the measurement criterion.

The same applies to Chief Legal Advisors who have business relations with their managers. If legal advisers do not understand the importance of developing meaningful measurement criteria, they will miss a great opportunity to demonstrate the contribution of their departments. How can this claim be justified when requesting more resources or asking for higher wages? The only way is to create a process to document what the legal department actually contributes to the company.

It is true that many people in management do not understand what the legal departments are actually doing. Managers may also not understand what the Human Resources departments are doing. But Human Resources departments do not intimidate managers such as law departments. Therefore, law departments should be proactive and measure the criteria they contribute to the company even if they are avoided.