Companies constantly add products and services, fueled by opportunity, technology and competition. They also continually grow into new geographic markets and contract in others. Often local legal talent is needed, because even though many businesses are now global, much of the law is still local. For years, legal functions have built local legal and compliance capability in their key markets. It’s a way to resolve the difficulty, cost and risk of delivering legal services to countries and cultures with diverse business practices and legal regimes.
Depending on the company’s growth strategy, in-house legal leaders do this by retaining outside advisors, hiring in-house professionals, or both. Building and managing a productive and high-performing international legal team is very demanding. In our 2017 Benchmark of global companies headquartered worldwide (3/4 of them publicly listed), 100% have in-house lawyers on the ground internationally. Nearly half have corporate counsel in more than 20 jurisdictions.
