Mr Farrell – general counsel at London-headquartered online financial services company Media Ingenuity – claims English lawyers need to do more than understand the numbers. He says lawyers, and in-house counsel in particular must cultivate closer ties with chief financial officers.
The abilities and strategies that the latter have learnt and developed could be extremely valuable to in-house lawyers as these skills are not generally taught at general counsel school.
Mr Farrel explains: ‘A lawyer understands obligations that a board must comply with. The CFO understands how those obligations are applied. A lawyer knows that a contract needs payment obligations. The CFO understands the mechanics and timings of how to implement the clause… A good CFO understands risk and when to take some.
‘Lawyers naturally feed into the business strategy as well, but from what I see are more removed from the business core – aloof even – proffering frameworks that are legal but lack nuanced understanding of what the board should do with the legal information. Lawyers will naturally try to run a risk-elimination strategy – great for law, not always that beneficial for the business.’