When Helen Pudlin decided she wanted to retire in three years from her job as global general counsel and executive vice president of PNC Financial Services Group Inc., she and her CEO developed a plan to choose her successor.

“Because of the heightened regulatory climate, we decided to look for someone who had been a financial regulator,” Pudlin said during a webinar Thursday on developing a legal department succession plan.

Pudlin said Pittsburgh-based PNC first hired a lawyer, Robert Hoyt, who had been general counsel at the U.S. Department of Treasury, “with the understanding that if he earned the seat, he would be the successor.”

She said he then worked closely with her and the executive team, handled broad responsibilities inside and outside the legal department, and gained significant exposure to the company's businesses and the board. He earned the GC job, although he left for another opportunity a year later.

Pudlin was one of three former general counsel and senior advisers at BarkerGilmore, a recruiting and management services firm, who spoke on the webinar about the importance of succession planning for the good of the legal department and the company.

Michelle Banks, former GC and chief compliance officer at Gap Inc. in San Francisco, said she started her succession planning very early—when she began her role as general counsel.

“Talent development takes time, ideally years,” Banks said. “So I immediately began reviewing the talent on my leadership team and several levels down, looking for high-performance individuals who had potential to reach the next level.”

Banks was the second Gap GC developed internally, and said she wanted to continue the trend. Over the years, she gave these promising individuals expanded roles through “stretch” assignments, paired them with executive mentors, increased their contacts with the board of directors and paid for financial and leadership training.

“I was general counsel for 10 years,” she explained, “and I was really committed [to having] at least two potential candidates in the running for the job. You don't want to be so myopic that you don't consider an external candidate, but I was pleased that the multiyear plan worked” when one of her internal candidates was selected.

The third speaker, Mark LeHocky, said succession planning can be tougher for smaller businesses. LeHocky started his GC career with Dreyer's Grand Ice Cream Inc. in Oakland, California.

“There were no other internal legal resources when Dreyer's brought me in,” LeHocky said. The company was actively pursuing growth, he said, so he built the legal department at first by adding staff whose skill sets were needed in the short term. Then, in time, he said, “I started identifying people who could be a potential successor at the company.”

After Dreyer's merged with Nestle, LeHocky joined a larger but “legally under-resourced” enterprise, Ross Stores in Pleasanton, California, as general counsel. “The first couple years it was a triage environment,” he said, and no one wanted to talk about succession planning.

So, LeHocky took it upon himself to hire new lawyers with potential for growth, while developing some attorneys he inherited. “I am very proud of the work I did to get that started, and of the transition to a very capable and fully formed lawyer,” he said.

The three former in-house leaders, along with moderator John Gilmore, co-founder of BarkerGilmore, stressed the benefits of succession planning, including increased recruitment power and retention as well as higher morale and job satisfaction.

A side benefit, Gilmore said, is “if you put more day-to-day responsibilities on shoulders of people on your team, it [broadens their experience and] frees up the general counsel's time to do higher-level strategic work, and become even more valuable to the company.”

Succession planning, he said, should be part of every GC's job description and is a leadership trait. “Leaders create more leaders,” he said.