Tap dancing your way from the bar to the boardroom
Ian McDougall is a practising barrister, the head of legal for a multinational company, and for a few months last year, the managing director of LexisNexis New Zealand. Darise Ogden finds out what enticed him to leave the bar for the boardroom

In the recent past, it would have been unusual to find a UK barrister going in-house. That is no longer the case; in fact, says Ian McDougall, a UK barrister and head of legal for LexisNexis International (LNI), it’s becoming more and more popular for barristers to go in-house, with more and more employers looking to barristers to fill in-house legal positions.

So what’s driving this rise in demand? Is it the growth in litigation? Possibly. McDougall thinks it has more to do with the particular skills a barrister develops in his or her life as an advocate. In particular, he points to the “heightened analytical sense” barristers gain as a result of their role as advisers to solicitors. “You get that kind of analytical detachment,” he says, “which I think is valuable in all sorts of different areas, not just the legal ones.”

More than just litigation
McDougall is a passionate advocate – both for the law and for his role as an in-house legal adviser; something that becomes very clear very quickly when you spend a bit of time with him. He loves the challenges that come through his door (or via his email) on a daily basis. “If we take a typical day, for example, there isn’t one,” he says. His day may begin with a contract issue, then he’ll move on to an employment issue, then web crawling or some other intellectual property issue, and then it might be a company matter. His team will do practically any area of law that comes through the door. “It’s easier for me to list the things we don’t do as the in-house team than to list those we do,” he says. (For the record, the LNI in-house team does not “do” family, criminal, or tax law.)

According to McDougall, “a properly functioning in-house department should be able to cater for about 75 per cent, or more if you’re lucky, of the company’s daily legal needs”.

When your organisation has offices in Canada, Latin America, Europe, Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, that means being familiar with the legal systems and laws of a number of different jurisdictions. France, for example, has a very different convention when it comes to drafting contracts than does the UK or other common law countries. “Because of their extensive codified system of law,” he says, “they tend to leave a lot out of their contracts and let the code deal with it. So you have contracts that are very, very short to someone from a common law jurisdiction; they’re worryingly short.”

While the laws may be different in each country for which he is ultimately responsible, McDougall has found the core issues are often the same. “There might be little quirks about how the principle is interpreted in different places, but the issues tend to be remarkably similar.”

Living by the Code
McDougall readily admits that he’s the type of person that follows the rules just to follow the rules. As such, he takes his barrister’s Code of Conduct very seriously. This can be difficult for non-lawyers to grasp, he says; the concept that there is something out there that is more important than your employment contract, more important even than following your superior’s instructions.

Living by the Code also means that he has to ensure that the lawyers in his team have a clear direction as to what they can and cannot do. As the head of a multinational legal department (he has one person in Canada, two in the UK, one in France, one in Germany, and one in Australia), one of the most worrying aspects of his job – and the thing that keeps him up at night – is people doing their own thing without guidance and approval. “If they don’t have guidance,” he says, “the range of options open to them tends to be much wider.”

Extending yourself
Towards the end of last year, McDougall found himself adding managing director to his CV, when he was asked to look after LexisNexis New Zealand.

For some lawyers, making the change from in-house legal adviser to decision maker can be an uneasy transition. For McDougall, however, this was not the case. Providing legal advice in his role as managing director was a “clear conflict of interest”. Therefore, to maintain his objectivity, and to avoid any conflict issues, all legal questions that arose in the New Zealand office during his tenure as New Zealand’s “commercial head” were directed to the in-house lawyer responsible for New Zealand – even when McDougall knew “full well” what the answer to the issue was.

During his time as managing director, McDougall found that the barristerial skills that assisted in the in-house legal role proved essential in a management position. “The ability to make decisions rapidly on the basis of assimilating information rapidly have been crucial, and are very well developed when you’re in litigation, especially when you’re an advocate and you’ve got to stand on your feet and come up with a plausible answer then and there,” he says. “Tap dancing, I call it.”
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here’s no mistaking the fact that McDougall has an opinion on any and every subject. So does he miss going to court? “The only time I miss private practice as a barrister is when I find myself once again inside the courtroom,” he says. “I used to love that – standing up in front of the judge, as I used to describe it, pontificating on a subject about which I knew very little. It was always very good fun.” However, if he ever feels the need for that adrenalin rush, as a practising barrister, he can (and occasionally does) still appear in Court. “The problem is that preparing for any kind of advocacy takes up so much time that it isn’t practical for me to do it very often.”

A temporary transition
While McDougall enjoyed his summer sojourn to New Zealand, his heart remains with his in-house legal team. “I can’t imagine anyone interested in the law being bored as the head of legal year after year, frankly, because we get so many different legal issues to deal with,” he says. So, as the new year dawned, McDougall quickly shed his role as managing director, and took himself back to the snow-covered streets of London, where he will spend his days jumping from subject matter to subject matter and jurisdiction to jurisdiction. “It certainly stops the day being monotonous, that’s for sure,” he chuckles.