[Editor’s note: This is the second segment of a six-part series – Succeeding In-House – by Christopher Mirabile, general counsel and CFO at IONA Technologies in Waltham, Mass., in which he will explain why basic legal skills are not enough for long-term success as an in-house attorney.]

Did you ever have a great piece of advice greeted with hostility? Or feel like you are often the last to find out about every project? Do you feel misunderstood from time to time?
Advancing your in-house career takes more than just traditional legal skills. It takes a different mindset, and the deliberate fusing of those legal skills with business awareness for a blended approach to in-house service.
In this multi-part feature, we go beyond the typical kinds of career advice to explore the harder-to-define skills that are essential in transforming an in-house lawyer from a duckling to a swan.
In this column, I will explore “context awareness.” The next four installments will be: Part Three: Communication; Part Four: Smart in-house practice; Part Five: Dealing with opposing counsel; and Part Six: Dealing with outside counsel.

Context awareness

Context awareness is the practice of staying aware of your surroundings and using that awareness to ensure your actions and advice are “in context” relative to the situation in which you are operating.
Just like an off-color remark can embarrass the speaker and hurt his or her credibility, advice delivered by a tone-deaf lawyer can be a sour note that ends up being ineffectual. Here are some ways to keep yourself in tune.
You are in a business. You are not in a law firm. Speak accordingly. Being a “good lawyer” in the narrow sense is not enough. Business people need lawyers who can talk and think like business people. If you want to communicate with management, talk in terms that they understand and make sure your advice is practical, actionable, and tied to the factors which matter to them.
Know your business. Don’t expect to have any credibility if you do not demonstrate a thorough understanding of the business you are advising. That means the strategy, goals, values, products, markets and customers. Put in whatever effort is required to understand the business of which you are a part.
Offer to buy lunch for a product manager or engineer or director of marketing and get them to explain their part of the business to you. Subscribe to Google news alerts for your company’s competitors. See what the financial analysts are saying about your business. Ask senior people what blogs they read or recommend. In short, simply take an interest.
Remember your role. Absent something dangerous, irresponsibly reckless, unethical or illegal, you are not there to decide whether a course of action is appropriate. You are there to educate, in the most practical and plain-spoken business language possible, what the risks are and then let the business people weigh the risk/benefit ratio and decide what course of action to take.
Have a strong, independent moral compass and don’t compromise on what you know in your heart to be wrong, but with respect to everything else, check the ego at the door, leave emotion out of it, and let the business people make the decisions they are paid to make.
Don’t go in blind. If you are joining a meeting, get the agenda beforehand and make sure you have the context and relevant tradeoffs relating to what is being discussed. But don’t make the mistake of getting just one viewpoint. If everybody was on the same page, they probably wouldn’t have called a meeting. Understand the goal of the meeting. Is it for information sharing, discussion and analysis, or final approval of a specific course of action? Knowing that in advance can be important to keeping yourself in context.
Consider your real purposes. If you work under a GC, remember that your first priority is to help the GC by taking on projects and getting them done in a way that meets or exceeds expectations and doesn’t require unnecessary GC supervision cycles. If you are sucking up unnecessary supervision cycles, you are not being as helpful as you need to be and you are diverting energy away from other pursuits.
Your second priority is to keep the GC informed about issues in the business so that she can help, make decisions, advise management, and avoid being embarrassed or damaging the credibility of your function by not knowing what is going on before management peers ask about it. Your context and purpose is to perform as part of a team that gives effective counsel to a business, and that counsel is often through the GC interface. To make that interface a success is to make yourself and your business successful.
Be efficient with your GC’s time. Try to answer questions on your own first. Batch process questions so that you are not interrupting with one-offs every two minutes. Bring the contract and other relevant materials with you when you go to discuss. Think through the question first and define the problem so that she doesn’t ask the obvious threshold question you never thought of and knock you off your feet.
Consider the problem from perspectives other than your own. Don’t apply only your own priorities to it. Have a proposed solution, answer, or course of action ready in case asked, but don’t bluster in pushing the solution until asked.
Never let your boss be embarrassed. Think about the bigger picture and a try to look a few steps ahead. It is crucial to avoid surprises. Try to anticipate what she will need and get it to her proactively. Consider what could go wrong, and what it takes for an analysis to be truly complete from the business’ perspective and try to help make sure your boss in a position to deliver a complete analysis.
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. If you intake a problem or assignment properly (look for a discussion of deliberate listening in Part 3, Communications), you will realize that speedy high-level directional guidance is often all that is needed at the initial point of engagement, not a detailed and definitive answer. Business moves fast, and business colleagues often require bits of help quickly – frequently the initial guidance is all they need for the moment. Don’t make them wait around for ponderous chunks of lawyer-speak delivered only after you have finished over-polishing them.
Keep an eye on the long view. In managing issues and deciding how to handle a problem, always imagine yourself as the counsel for a potential buyer of your company. Picture yourself being asked to do M&A due diligence on your own work. Failing to stick to your guns and insist on a flexible assignment clause in what later turns out to be a strategic agreement, for example, could significantly impair the value of your company someday. Always try for the durable solution rather than the easy or quick one.
With a little effort you can raise your context awareness and dramatically improve your impact and effectiveness. Next up: Communication; how poor communication skills can sink you and how proper communication can increase your effectiveness by an order of magnitude.

Christopher Mirabile is chief financial officer and general counsel at IONA Technologies, an integration software company based in Waltham, Mass. and Dublin Ireland. Christopher was previously with the business group at Testa, Hurwitz & Thibeault, LLP in Boston, where he represented both private and publicly-held companies with a focus on corporate and securities law, public and private securities offerings, and mergers & acquisition, Prior to that he was a member of the Strategic Consulting Group at Price Waterhouse. He is a member of the board of directors of the Northeast Chapter of the Association of Corporate Counsel.

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In the September issue of New England In-House, the next installment of Succeeding In-House will focus on communication, namely, how poor communication skills can sink you, and how proper communication can increase your effectiveness considerably.