The general counsel role is broad from the start, spanning risk management, corporate governance, regulatory compliance, and everything from commercial deals to mergers and acquisitions, with the whole legal department suddenly looking to one person for answers.
So we asked sitting general counsel the same question across our interview series. What follows is the advice 12 of them would give a first-time GC, in their own words, on building trust, working as a business leader, choosing what matters, and leading a team rather than carrying the work alone.
Every general counsel we spoke with across the GC Sidebar series came back to the same starting point: legal advice only works when the people receiving it trust the person giving it.
In our conversation with Heather Stevenson, General Counsel at Red Cell Partners, which builds healthcare, cybersecurity, and national security companies, she put trust at the top of the list:
“Building trust with your internal team, and particularly leadership, is your number one priority. If you don’t have their trust, your excellent legal advice is going to go ignored.”
Her point for a new GC is practical. Credibility is what gets your counsel acted on, and it’s what lets you deliver hard answers without losing the room.
In another episode with Rich Foehr, General Counsel of Electrification Software at GE Vernova, trust traced back to clarity:
“If you can simplify communication, you become more reliable as a trusted partner.”
He coaches new lawyers to distill advice to its simplest terms, because clients want answers, not a tour of every risk you spotted. Do that consistently, and you become the trusted advisor that leadership calls first.
Lisa Gorman, former Chief Legal Officer at Eventbrite, reframed what credibility even looks like in her GC Sidebar conversation:
“Your best work is often invisible. Your credibility is built on the risks you flag that never happen.”
For a first-time GC measuring their own impact, it’s a reminder that the wins frequently look like nothing going wrong at all.
A modern general counsel treats the company’s business strategy and its legal strategy as one, and watches legal spend like any other line on the budget.
In our conversation with Fabio Bertoni, General Counsel at The New Yorker, he drew the line clearly:
“If you’re just giving pure legal advice, you’re not really doing your job. You need to deeply understand the client, what matters to them, and the broader goals of the business.”
Business acumen is the job.
Luis Machado, General Counsel at TopBuild, made the same case in his episode and pushed it further:
“You cannot possibly know too much about your business. And I’m not talking about legal. I’m talking about the business you’re in and the business you’re supporting.”
His advice to a new GC is to sit in on sales calls and learn how the company makes money, whether the next matter is a routine contract or a major acquisition.
Alisha Cieslak, former Chief Legal and Risk Officer at Gordon Food Service, distilled the whole theme into a sentence in our conversation:
“A modern GC has to be a business leader first, whose work is informed by the law.”
She frames legal issues in the language the C-suite already speaks: revenue, corporate strategy, and risk, rather than in legal jargon.
A first-time GC can try to win every issue, or they can be effective. Several of our guests learned the difference the hard way, and most of it comes down to knowing which matters to own, which to route to outside counsel, and which to let go.
In our conversation with Ron Bell, Chief Legal and Administrative Officer at Collective Health, the lesson was about prioritization:
“You don’t have to win every battle. You just have to know which battles matter.”
He runs issues through a simple filter, asking whether something is genuinely business-essential or just noise, so his team spends its energy and its legal spend where it counts.
Shu White, Chief Legal Officer and Head of People at Motive, paired that judgment with conviction in her episode:
“Being principled about the advice you give, and having the courage to stand by your convictions, is critical.”
Picking your battles isn’t about avoiding hard stances, she notes. It’s about knowing which ones are worth your credibility.
Bita Goldman, Global General Counsel at UNiDAYS, offered the same idea as a discipline for staying level-headed, sharing in her conversation:
“The most valuable lesson I’ve learned as a GC is to pause, take a second, reassess what’s going on, and think long-term. You don’t need to be reactive in your decision-making.”
For high-achievers who move fast, she says, the hard part is remembering to pause at all.
The last theme reframes the role itself. A general counsel’s job isn’t to be the smartest lawyer in the room, but to build and lead a team and a network that makes the whole legal function stronger. The best ones set the tone for their in-house lawyers and shape the company culture around them.
In our conversation with Jenn Wall, General Counsel at Intrinsic, the point was about interdependence:
“My success as a GC really depends on my team, and my team’s success depends on me. It’s very symbiotic.”
She encourages new GCs to think like an architect, designing how the team is structured and how the work flows, not just doing the work themselves.
Rishi Varma, Chief Legal and Ethics & Compliance Officer at Cargill, whose remit runs from litigation to regulatory compliance, took the pressure off knowing everything in his episode:
“You don’t have to know everything. What matters is knowing how to process uncertainty.”
His method is to break a complex problem into smaller questions and lean on the people around him, which is its own argument for building a strong team early.
Jaci Lee, Senior Vice President and General Counsel at Flynn Group, measures leadership by the people who stay, telling us in her conversation that the best career advice she ever got was really a question:
“Who stays at the organization because of you, because of your kindness and your mentorship, because you see them and want to develop them?”
Ask any of these leaders what caught them off guard, and the answer is rarely a legal question. The biggest surprises of their first year are a story of their own.
The hardest parts of the general counsel role are about trust, business judgment, prioritization, and leadership, not legal knowledge alone. A first-time GC who builds credibility early, learns the business cold, picks the battles that matter, and leads a team rather than carrying everything solo is already most of the way there. For more on making that transition, our New GC Toolkit lays out the patterns that successful general counsels follow in their first year and beyond.
A few questions come up again and again from lawyers stepping into the general counsel role for the first time.
The most common advice is to build trust with leadership before you need it, learn how the business makes money, focus only on the issues that truly matter, and invest in your team early. Legal expertise is assumed; judgment and relationships are what set a great GC apart.
A good general counsel pairs sound legal judgment with real business acumen, communicates simply, and earns the trust of the executive team. The GCs we interviewed consistently described themselves as business leaders with a legal lens, fluent in corporate strategy as well as intellectual property, contracts, and compliance.
Common qualities include credibility with leadership, executive presence, the ability to prioritize under pressure, the courage to stand by a position, emotional intelligence, and a focus on developing the legal team. The strongest legal advisors also stay calm and solution-oriented when issues escalate.
In the first year, focus on relationships and context: understand the business model, build trust with the C-suite, get a handle on legal spend and outside counsel relationships, and learn where legal can move the company forward instead of only flagging risk. Many general counsels also serve as corporate secretary, so governance lands on their plate early too.
It usually comes down to trust. As several GCs noted, sound advice gets ignored when the relationship isn’t there. The fix is to build credibility early, frame guidance in business terms, and be clear about which risks are genuinely worth a hard stop.
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