Now that you’ve become a member of an in-house legal team, you’ll need to step into your own unique executive presence in order to elevate your personal brand and increase demand for your work. Through coaching, you can experiment with different professional personas, consider how others’ presence is received within the organization, and refine your image as a trusted business advisor.

To be effective as in-house counsel, you’ll need to know as much as possible about the values and interests of key decision makers and how to manage those interests, even when they diverge significantly. Through coaching, you can sort through the web of established relationships and consider carefully how and with whom you spend your time and resources to best set yourself up for success.

The role of an in-house attorney isn’t just to give legal advice. It’s to give legal advice that facilitates the business’ goals and objectives. To do that, you’ve got to know and understand what those goals and objectives are. Coaching can help you identify what you need to know about the business in order to be optimally effective, including assessing the enterprise appetite for risk, understanding business verticals, and defining revenue streams.

While subject-matter expertise is important for in-house lawyers, independent judgment is what sets the most successful attorneys apart. As a steward of the business, you may be asked to make decisions that require you to synthesize all you know about the business and its players without precise direction from your superiors. Coaching can help you gain confidence that you have the knowledge and judgment to make the right decisions for the business.

To be an effective in-house communicator, you must craft messaging that conveys the facts and risks important to business leaders so that they can make informed decisions about how to steer the enterprise. Many new in-house attorneys struggle with striking the correct balance between what a lawyer finds important and what a business leader needs to know. Coaching can help you navigate the early days of in-house communication and refine your style to meet the needs of your stakeholders within the organization.