“A brilliant surgeon saved our baby’s life. It changed how I approached life as a lawyer”

Everything changed when my wife Sandra and I had our first child, Oliver.

On 6 February 2014, Oliver was born with a critical pulmonary stenosis, a heart condition that required urgent surgery. He was four days old.

After the operation in London, the surgeon sat down with us. He was, and continues to be, my hero.

It was a life-changing conversation. He was extremely capable on the technical and operational side – he performed a very difficult operation on a tiny baby.

But he was also so understanding of Sandra and I and the pressure we were under.

He managed to explain something very complex in a simple and empathetic way and understood – because no doubt he does this all the time with parents – that a child is the most precious thing in the world, and emotionally, his work was going to have a real impact on us.

It took a while for the trauma to pass. But when it did, I found myself thinking about what I was doing in my day job as a senior in-house lawyer.

A sense of, “Why am I looking at the wording of a contract that no one appears to be that interested in?”. In fact, I wasn’t interested in it myself – I couldn’t see the value.

I worked in an industry that I really cared about, but I felt no connection between the work I was doing and the overall mission of the company.

At that point, I kept wondering “Why do lawyers – who are intellectually very smart – often focus so narrowly on things? Why do we spend so long worrying about crafting a beautiful sentence, in language very few people follow, when our talent can be used for so much more than that?”

“Common sense isn’t always common practice”

It was the start of a big shift for me. I questioned what was stopping so many talented people from flourishing as lawyers.

I found they were often becoming disillusioned with the role or the industry, and moving on to something they felt better suited their skills.

Lawyers are highly intelligent people – but that surgeon was not only technically brilliant, he balanced it beautifully with empathy and compassion. He had our complete trust.

While many lawyers possess these human skills, I felt that action was needed to ensure those skills are more visible and valued right across the profession.

This was, of course, before the current focus on artificial intelligence (AI), which has now massively amplified the need for these human skills.

A general counsel (GC) once said to me: “We bring well-rounded people into law and we flatten them”. Unfortunately, I think that’s true.

We recruit the brightest and best into the industry – people who want to make a difference as well as have an intellectual challenge. They don’t want to come in and subsequently question their purpose.

After the drama of Olivier’s birth, I left the legal team at the business and joined the commercial team – before returning to legal a year later.

Image: Dr Sachin Khambadkone and Oliver, Dan’s son.

In the commercial team, it became immediately clear that the work they were doing was much more strategic and had the eyes and ears of leadership across the business.

It made me realise just how far removed an in-house legal team could be from the real action, where strategies were being set and business decisions were being made, with minimal input from the legal function.

It really hit home when I returned to head up the legal function. When I told a managing director the kind of things we were working on, he replied "not one of those things, Dan, is on my worry list”.

So I changed our approach. We started showing we cared about and understood the business.

It was noticed. We were now being invited earlier into meetings. Stakeholders were sharing things with us that they were not before.

We could help them avoid pitfalls earlier and ultimately make better decisions.

This is where the idea of developing well-rounded skills came from, and how O Shaped started.

I eventually left in-house law to drive the O Shaped mission forward. It has enabled us to build a cross-industry community to help shape the future of the profession; to make it better for those who are in it, those who use it and those who are entering it.

As I have discovered over the last few years, much of this may at first glance seem like common sense, but common sense isn’t always common practice!

From giving legal advice to delivering a legal service

One of the things we always talk about at O Shaped is how to start seeing things through the lens of our stakeholders.

For example, if work is sent over too late to legal and the team spends time reviewing it, it creates a negative perception that the legal function is the ‘blocker’.

In-house teams will then tell the business to “get us involved earlier” creating yet more tension.

This doesn’t help – it’s still telling others what to do, rather than listening, learning and exploring how to make it better for everyone.

To do that requires a mindset shift from ‘we are here to give legal advice’ to ‘we are providing a legal service’.

We all know what it feels like to receive good and bad service in our personal lives, so we should be capable of creating a user experience of legal that is fantastic.

However, that is often not the case. We can’t only think like lawyers. If we also think like service providers, we will create a better all-round experience for the user.

That doesn’t mean we compromise on the quality of legal advice. On the contrary, the legal advice will be more relevant and in context.

For my in-house team, it was a departure from “what’s your legal issue; this is how we’d move forward; we’ll see you again when you need us”.

Over time, it became: “Dan and team, this is brewing. We trust you – can we get your early input to this?”.

It brought us closer to strategic leads and made sure we were working on the right things. That’s something every busy in-house team wants.

Good ethics and strong human skills

I have always believed that there is a close connection between strong relationships with business colleagues and a strong ethical culture.

The better the relationship, the earlier lawyers are sighted on potential issues, and the earlier they can support or intervene.

We often weave this approach to ethics into the stakeholder relationships programmes we run for in-house teams.

Similarly, we also run ethics workshops with Browne Jacobson, one of our law firm partners, together with their clients.

We use real-life examples and case studies to discuss what the right thing is and how to make better decisions – including when under pressure.

We also cover guidance published by the Solicitors Regulation Authority. Understanding this is a non-negotiable for in-house teams.

Good ethics and strong human skills are completely interwoven.

You are always going to get some bad actors, but the vast majority of people in the legal industry do the right thing day in and day out, using their human skills to influence better decision-making in their businesses.

We focus on creating a strong culture of ethical decision-making.

Through our workshops, we want to support people to find alternatives if they feel that something is incorrect, immoral or improper.

To do that effectively, you want to be able to rely on your regulator.

But before it gets to that stage, we explore the various opportunities for intervention before raising the regulatory alarm.

Building an ethics support network

In in-house law, the worst thing is to be isolated.

If you’re a junior lawyer starting out in the profession, one of the key things is to build your own support network so that you’ve got people you can rely on – be it peer groups, mentors, or finding senior leaders in the business that you trust, and who trust you.

Honing your people and business skills will help strengthen these stakeholder relationships.

A strong ethical culture needs strong leaders.

I feel there is a real opportunity to improve the leadership capability across the legal industry, making it a discipline of its own right and not just an add on to a fee-earners’ existing workload, when capacity allows.

Amongst other things, this would help to create an environment where people feel safe to raise concerns and are comfortable speaking to others when faced with an ethical dilemma.

That’s where O Shaped – and our law firm and legal education partners – add something to the conversation to help professionals and leaders.

Finding the right balance between being aligned with the commercial needs of the business and maintaining independence isn’t easy.

But it is entirely achievable, and necessary in making sure that lawyers influence better business decisions.

That’s ultimately core to our jobs.

And my son Oliver? He has had two more heart operations, just turned 11 and is doing brilliantly.

That’s a result of the wonders of modern science, fantastic surgeons and good people.