General Counsel services

General Counsel Initiative

As General Counsel, you need to strike a balance between your professional obligations and commercial responsibilities to your employer. This is why CMS have been working in partnership with influential GCs for over a decade to produce a series of innovative publications to empower you in your role, increase your value to your business and support your personal career development.

Supporting General Counsel

Over the course of our thought leadership reports and numerous related roundtable events, the General Counsel Initiative has looked at some of the most important issues, opportunities and challenges for GCs today – not just organisational and business questions, but also those relating to individual careers and personal development.

Collating insights from a diverse range of sectors and industries, to date our contributors to our General Counsel initiative includes:

• Citibank
• Coca-Cola
• GSK
• Investec
• Lendlease
• Lloyd’s Banking Group
• Mercedes Benz
• Nationwide
• Sony
• Thomson Reuters
• Vodafone

The Value Pyramid

We understand that GCs have a number of aspects to their roles and competing priorities, including significant time and financial constraints. We developed the GC Value Pyramid to help GCs assess the value of their contribution to the business and in turn their standing. 

This divides tasks into four levels, according to the value they provide to the business. Level 1 involves tasks with the greatest perceived strategic value to the business. The tasks in the bottom level (Level 4), while essential, are felt to be “bread and butter” work. Many of the GCs we talk to still find the value pyramid useful when considering their role.

Download the latest General Counsel reports

You can download each full report by clicking on the one you would like to read below.  We hope you will find them interesting and useful in your role as General Counsel.